Job Candidate Personas: How to Use Them in Your Hiring Strategy

All job openings come with a set of preferred skills and requirements. But beyond that, how can hiring managers make sure they’re targeting and attracting the right people?

Candidate personas are a helpful tool for navigating the hiring landscape and ensuring teams target, attract, and fill their positions with best-fit candidates. At a time when so many employers are struggling to fill critical roles or find top talent, they can help create a competitive edge.

So, what exactly is a candidate persona, and how can teams leverage them in their hiring strategy? Read on as we dive in.

What is a Job Candidate Persona?

A candidate persona, sometimes referred to as a job seeker persona, is a fictionalized representative of your ideal candidate.

They’re created using information gathered from a variety of real-world sources like previous candidate interviews, surveys, industry research, existing employees, hiring trends, and more.

A job seeker persona is meant to be rich in detail, using historical knowledge to determine the ideal work history, career goals, skills, traits, and employment preferences for your target job candidate.

The Value of Creating Candidate Personas

Many hiring teams have a general idea of their perfect candidate, but it may not be formally documented or built out in-depth, and that could hinder their efforts.

Having a formal job seeker persona is part of a strategy that teams can use to inform and improve their end-to-end hiring process. The biggest value job seeker personas offer hiring teams are:

Attract higher quality candidates: In addition to finding candidates with the right job experience, job candidate personas ensure alignment with candidates who share core values, goals, or employment preferences with the rest of the organization. Tailoring job descriptions and recruitment processes to fit the persona’s characteristics means hiring teams are more likely to attract higher-quality candidates.
Higher conversions from top candidates: By targeting specific personas that succeeded at your organization, hiring managers can ensure better success in sourcing top candidates. Having recruitment efforts that are personalized and relevant to candidates also creates a better candidate experience, which increases the likelihood of successful conversions.
Cost savings and results-driven recruitment: Creating job seeker personas takes work up-front, but it saves time and effort in the long run. They streamline recruitment efforts by being more precise about who you’re targeting, wasting less time on generic job postings, and ensuring teams recruit on the most relevant channels.

Tips to Create a Job Seeker Persona

Candidate personas should be personalized for each job opening, but the process of creating them is easily replicable. It begins with gathering as much detailed information as possible, analyzing it, and building it out from there.

1. Identify Your Target Roles

Before you can begin gathering data, it helps to understand your current and future hiring needs. Identify target roles that need to be filled and prioritize which personas are most important to develop first.

Consider your current list of job openings—hard-to-fill positions versus high-volume or entry-level roles, roles that are critical to the business, and roles that require special experience or seniority.

Not every role will require a job seeker persona, but understanding your job openings can help to segment and prioritize which roles require a detailed persona and would have the biggest impact on your hiring efforts.

2. Gather Critical Data

Once you’ve determined which target role, it’s time to gather as much relevant data as possible. You can gather data from a host of historical sources, such as:

Existing employees—Analyze the attributes and backgrounds of current employees who excel in the roles you’re hiring for. Consider interviews or surveys with these employees to gain insights about what attracted them to your company and what would have aided their job search.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)—Utilize ATS and HR systems to extract historical applicant data and pull consistent trends and characteristics from resumes, application forms, and interview notes.
Job boards and databases—Analyze data from job boards or resume databases to identify common qualifications and skills among candidates applying for similar roles. Collect data on keywords, qualifications, and job descriptions that would fit your target persona.
Market research and competitor analysis—Leverage market research, like industry reports, to understand the broader job market and glean insights into salary expectations, market trends, and job seeker preferences per industry. On top of this, consider studying industry peers by looking at their LinkedIn listings and Glassdoor reviews to gain insights on how you stack up against competitors.
Exit interviews—Collect feedback from former candidates who applied to your organization, even if they weren’t hired. Conducting exit interviews with departing employees can also offer insight into why people leave your company and what areas exist for improvement.
Brainstorms and persona workshops—Conduct persona workshops or brainstorming sessions with your HR team, hiring managers, and employees to uncover insights.

There’s no limit to the information you can collect on your perfect candidate persona, but it helps to focus on:

Skills, qualifications, and relevant certifications
Work history, location, and career progression
Motivations and challenges
Long- and short-term career goals
Job search behavior

3. Tailor Data into Your Personas

What do you do with the mountain of data collected? This is when teams can review their data and identify trends or shared traits that can be used to build out job-seeker personas.

Each grouped persona can be given a name, such as “Experienced Senior Enterprise Sales Candidate” or “Tech-Savvy Information Security Specialist.” Once you identify a persona, you should build out a detailed profile to include ideal background, training, skills, goals, and traits. The robust persona will help hiring managers navigate the hiring landscape and make educated decisions about candidates.

Leveraging Candidate Personas in Your Hiring Efforts

Job seeker personas are helping more hiring teams streamline their efforts while finding better success. As more job seeker personas are built out, hiring teams can create an arsenal of personas to pull from to help expedite their hiring processes.

Although creating an initial job seeker persona can be time-consuming, they are well worth the ROI and impact they make on recruitment efforts in the long run.