In this competitive market, finding the right candidate can be a complex and time-consuming process for a business.
To reduce such complexity, human resources (HR) professional employ the method of profiling candidate personas.
Job candidate personas can play an important role in choosing the right or ideal candidate for a specific job position. Data-driven personas can make it even easier to shortlist a candidate.
Let’s understand the term candidate persona: Candidate persona is a fabricated illustration for all the ideal job candidates. Having a proper candidate persona helps the company to improve its recruiting and talent procurement strategies. A standard candidate persona involves skills, records, education, and qualification. A candidate persona can also lay point to the characteristics of a candidate like:
- Personality traits
- Career goals
- Soft skills
- Employment preferences
Uses of candidate personas: Creating a good candidate persona helps the companies to understand their exact requirement for a specific role. There are several uses of creating a candidate persona following are listed below:
- Attracting the ideal candidate – having a proper candidate persona helps the companies to attract the right candidates for the job.
- Upgrading employers branding – with a proper method of recruitment methods, the company showcases its potentials in attracting and showcasing the top talents.
- Reducing the turnover rates – a fluent recruitment procedure helps the company to reduce its turnover rates.
How data-driven personas play an effective role: Data-driven personas developed by APG serve as a system for automatic creation of personas by analysing online data. Following are the list of benefits of Data-driven personas:
- Giving faces to data
- Helping stakeholders communicate user data
- Representing big user data
- Staying Up-to-Date over time
- Achieving high accuracy
- Maintaining privacy of individuals
- Being cost-effective to develop and maintain
Steps to leverage personas:
Step 1: Collection of data – Types of information required:
- Demographic information: job title, location, and age.
- Background check: education qualification and works.
- Qualification: any specialized skills, certificates, or project.
- Web search: social sites of the candidate, where do they look up for jobs and where do they spend time on the internet.
- Personal characteristics: strengths, weakness, personal traits, and fear.
- Goals: what personal achievements they want to fulfill shortly.
Step 2: Get the trend set – Lists of questions to consider:
- What skills that the ideal candidate should possess?
- What motivates the ideal candidate?
- What kind of Environment that the ideal candidate is looking for?
- What is the kind of job that the ideal candidate is looking for?
- Where does the ideal candidate find themselves in five years?
- What skills that the ideal candidate needs to possess for the job?
- How does the ideal candidate cope up with the rest of the team?
Step 3: Generating personas –After getting done with the first two-step, it’s time to build up the persona stories. Common answers could be used to create a hypothetical candidate persona. More than being a job description it looks like, how an ideal candidate suits the place of work. Some companies go a level higher by implementing personas name and picture, all the way making it more realistic and handier in nature.
In order to create an excellent team, a proper candidate persona is an essential requirement.
A data-driven persona helps the company, to list out the effective and eligible candidates for the existing job. With an effective candidate persona and clarified strategy, the recruiter shall be able to implement the seed of companies recruiting initiative to the candidate’s preference.
Personas help HR to identify the right job candidate.
Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020) Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management. 4(1), 1-17.
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