HRs constructs a candidate persona to picture an ideal candidate for a specific position in the organization. It is generally a guide to a perfect candidate, that includes the requirements of what type of person you need for a particular job role. Hiring Managers list a detailed description of the expertise, knowledge, experience, personality traits, and other characteristics the ideal candidates should have to fit the role.
It is a method to help recruiters identify and attract the right candidate, making the recruitment process more targeted and efficient.
The main goal of candidate persona is to attract the right people, it helps you target and attract better people, to ensure that they are a perfect asset for the organization in the long run, eliminating all the assumptions of what you may need in a new hire. Following are a few benefits of crafting a candidate persona, that show their importance.
When you keep in mind all the qualities a candidate should have for a specific job role, you create a more personalized candidate persona, and you can easily identify how and which candidate matches your persona. The more personalized manner, the better the candidate experience and ultimately the higher the offer-acceptance rate.
Creating the candidate persona helps your team members increase the efficiency of recruitment marketing campaigns as you know your perfect candidate and you target the right audience, ultimately lowering the time-to-hire. It helps you focus on who you want to engage with and where, so you invest directly into the right recruitment channels and material, that will help you get familiar with your target audience.
As you know your specific audience and you target them only, this ultimately reduces the time-to-hire. The recruitment process becomes even faster because you are spending less time searching for candidates, saving the company time and cost per hire. You know all the requirements of an ideal candidate and you explain all of them to the candidate beforehand, making sure they completely understand what is expected of them and they are happy accepting the offer, increasing the offer acceptance rate and employee retention as happy employees tend to stay for a longer term.
A candidate persona helps you find the right candidate for your company, you know the candidate that matches your company culture and is fit for the organization, eventually elevating the workplace environment and culture.
The first and most important step is to gather information from different stakeholders, team members, and job candidates. After completing the research, use the data to storify the candidate's persona. This can be done in the following way:
Interview stakeholders, ask them questions, and spend more time with them. This can help you understand their views in getting insight into which type of candidate they think would be the ideal fit. Communicate with HRs and recruiters, to understand the qualities required in the new hire. Ask them about the job title, minimum age and the salary range for the job, experience, and skills they expect in prospective candidates, and the location they require the candidate to work from. You get to know the stakeholder’s perspective on the candidate’s persona, after knowing the answers to these above-mentioned questions.
Just like interviewing stakeholders, you also need to ask questions from team members, as it will help you create an efficient candidate persona. Gather 2-3 members from your team, interview them about their personal and professional goals, where they want to see themselves after certain years, what motivates them to stay in the company, what challenges they face while completing their tasks or goals, and questions like which articles do they like to read, what are their interest, how easy or difficult it is for them to adjust themselves with the company culture and etc. Questions like these help you get a deeper insight into the ideal candidate and the open position, creating a more efficient candidate persona.
Interviewing candidates proves to be an important basis for creating hypotheses on the candidate personas, as they can help you and your team to collect information about the skills, expertise, qualities, and personality traits of ideal candidates who are interested in the open position. If your drafted hypothesis is true then most of the ideal candidates will match the persona.
Interviewing candidates can help you identify attributes that are common in most of the candidates, such as their age, goals, experience, background, expectations, personalities, and many other characteristics. This can also help you identify what skills were missing in the persona, and you can later refine it according to the information.
Now that you have gathered enough information, after interviewing stakeholders, team members, and candidates, but now you need to storify the candidate's persona, by finding similarities in the data so that your team can gain from the collected data.
While creating a candidate persona template, you can divide the template into the following different sections:
First, make a section about who your ideal candidate should be. From the collected data, Fill out the following details:
Demographic details
Background details
Personal preferences: This will contain all the details related to the personal preferences of the candidate.
This section will consist of objectives, challenges, and driving factors, that are filled according to your collected data.
Goals: Consist of Primary goals and Secondary goals. That can contain further sub-categories such as professional and personal goals.
Challenges: Consist of Primary challenges and Secondary challenges.
This section includes information related to what motivates them to apply for the open position, and what are they looking for in a job. It consists of the following details:
In the end, give the ideal job candidate reasons to choose your company, and how this organization is better than other organizations. Show them what your company can offer in terms of culture and growth.
Here are a few samples of candidate personas that might help you craft them:
Candidate Persona for a software engineer
Candidate Persona for a marketing manager
Note that these templates are just subjective and you can create them according to the open job role and requirements of your organization.
It completely depends upon the needs of the organization or the nature of the job role, when creating a candidate persona, but it's a better idea to create one whenever your organization is looking to hire. It's best to draft them at the early stage of the recruiting process, as it gives you a complete view of your ideal hire.
Crafting a candidate persona requires a team effort, and many parties of the hiring team such as the hiring manager, stakeholders, candidates, recruiters, team leads, and other team members are involved in the process.
A candidate persona is an essential tool for getting a clear picture of the right candidates for open positions, and what qualities, traits, skill sets, experience, expertise, and educational qualifications the candidate should have in order to get selected. Moreover, it increases the efficiency of the recruitment efforts which helps in improving and optimizing the recruitment process.
In order to create a perfect candidate persona, you need to craft a template according to the position your organization is hiring for. The template can be divided into different sections and the number of sections is subjective to the organization. Create perfect candidate personas so that you target candidates that are best and hire them for the open position, which can ultimately help you improve your recruitment process.
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Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier
Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier
Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier
Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier
Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier
Hirecinch is one of the best applicant tracking system I have used ever, literally my my job easier
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