What are Candidate Personas aka Employee Personas?
Candidate personas represent the final stage of the audience identification process, a core phase of employer brand marketing. They play an important role in employer branding by helping strategists to focus on the most appropriate recruitment media, topic clusters for content, and tone of voice.
In this guide, we’ll give you a comprehensive candidate persona definition, helping you to better understand the characteristics and purpose of these important HR marketing tools.
Candidate persona meaning
Before we dive into how they’re used in employer brand marketing, let’s define candidate personas.
The word “candidate” refers to anyone identified as being suitable for a particular role within an organisation, but who doesn’t already work in that role. They may be a passive candidate, meaning they’re not actively looking for work or an active candidate, meaning that they are actively looking for work. (Learn more about passive and active candidates.)
A “persona” refers to the aspects of a person’s character that they allow to be perceived by others. It’s a concept that comes from psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who suggests that developing a persona is an essential part of becoming a socialised adult.
In employer marketing terminology, then, a candidate persona represents the outwardly expressed preferences, needs, ambitions, challenges, and behaviours of the ideal person suited to do a specific job.
This type of persona is semi-fictional because, whilst its construction is informed by research into the overt characteristics of real people who do certain types of jobs, its representation is based on an idealisation. In other words, a candidate persona represents the “dream applicant” to a particular role.
When to build candidate personas
The crafting of candidate personas occurs at the end of the audience identification phase of employer brand building. This allows strategists to weave appropriate research findings into them. [See Fig.1.]
Types of research that tend to be conducted prior to development of candidate personas include:
- Employee focus groups
- Keyword research
- Google Analytics research
- Internal talent audits
- Employer brand awareness surveys
These all help to shape candidate personas into more reliable tools for marketing purposes.
Why do you need candidate personas?
Candidate personas are essential to a robust employer marketing strategy. Each one acts as iconographic summary of lots of different aspects of a specific target audience segment.
These easy-to-understand representations of ideal future employees help strategists to humanise their marketing efforts. That’s important because certain individual audience data sets may be misleading when taken in isolation.
Say, for instance, Audience A is made up of single, childless people with no siblings, yet they are also found to have strong family values.
Treated individually, each of these data sets may lead us to opposing conclusions about the other. Yet, when looked at from a more holistic persona perspective, we can make a different, more human set of inferences—here, for example, that our persona craves the familial experiences they never had themselves.
This type of humanised analysis enables more informed decision making when developing employer marketing strategies, leading to greater effectiveness of approach. So a candidate persona is an important, early aspect of assuring return on investment (ROI) for an employer marketing project.
How to create candidate personas
It’s crucial that you learn how to use candidate personas effectively in your talent marketing strategy. Not only will this give the strategy a greater chance of success, it will also help you to craft the personas in such a way that they focus on the most important audience data.
A candidate persona serves three core purposes. It informs:
MEDIA SELECTION
By understanding how a specific audience segment chooses and interacts with certain media, employer marketing strategists can build platform strategies that meet those choices and behaviours.
Often, the main driver behind media selections are simple demographics, such as “high female readership.” Candidate personas narrow this kind of broad targeting, enabling employer brand marketers to hit a dream candidate bullseye with their media choices.
They may, for example, look at a persona’s political beliefs, leading to a selection of a more left-leaning or right-leaning publication within which to publish advertising or guest content.
A robust persona that goes beyond the boundaries of experience, education, and demographics will allow you to save money on media by improving your aim.
MESSAGING STRATEGY
Candidate personas don’t just inform where you publish your employer brand message; they also tell you what you need to say.
Looking at a combination of employer brand awareness data and search intent during keyword research, for example, will tell you how much your audience personas already know about you as an employer, and what type of content they’re looking for—informational, transactional, commercial, or navigational. This helps you understand whether your employer brand content should offer broad (career related) topic overviews, professional development guides, specific role deep dives, or landing pages to drive quick conversions to applications.
Another example of how candidate personas inform messaging strategy is in developing topic clusters for careers website and social media content. Survey, focus group, and keyword research data may, for example, highlight a broad persona interest in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) and more specific interest in things like “how to organise a pride event at work” or “top 10 employers for disabled people UK.”
This allows you to craft a content strategy that not only zeros in on the topics your candidate persona cares about, but also to create a strong network of related internal hyperlinks and keywords on your careers site to boost its search engine optimisation (SEO).
TONE OF VOICE
A combination of in-house talent auditing, keyword research, and Google Analytics research will reveal the preferred learning styles of your various candidate personas. This will help you to craft content with an appropriate tone of voice.
You may find, for example, that a particular persona doesn’t listen to podcasts of more than 20 minutes’ duration. Or that they only click on headlines of 8 words or fewer. In this case, a bite-sized approach to content creation is appropriate, using simple words and sentence structure. Another persona, meanwhile, may prefer to read lengthy blog posts, listen to hour-long podcasts, and watch long-form videos. This persona can reasonably assumed to prefer deep, thought-provoking content with richer, more complex language.
In either case, the candidate persona highlights how to create impactful employer brand messages in a style of language that is both understood and appreciated by the target audience.
So, when you craft a candidate persona, these are the data sets you should aim for it to deliver. In short, you should ask yourself, “what do they consume, where do they consume it, and how does it address them?” Then craft a persona based on the results.
Start by conducting the types of research detailed above. This will arm you with enough data to build a compelling, richly detailed, and accurate candidate persona. Now, cross reference the results with the three core purposes of the persona building process, jotting down relevant notes about the candidate under each of those three headings.
This will give you the draft format of your candidate persona.
It’s important that you sense check the draft persona with your team to make sure it feels like a representation of both a real person and, more importantly, the kind of person you should be hiring. Once this has been amended and agreed, it can be tidied up and formalised as part of your employer brand toolkit.
An important point: the key difference between a candidate persona and a customer persona is that the latter will typically include detailed demographic information, such as ethnicity, age, and marital status—it will even include a name and an avatar to make it more lifelike.
A candidate persona can do this—and will, in fact, give you much better targeting options if it does. However, only give your candidate persona detailed demographic information if you intend to engage in micro-targeting, i.e., crafting content for segments of audience segments (e.g., LGBTQ+ women in the tech sector). Otherwise you risk developing audience personas that discriminate against certain groups, which renders your employer brand potentially unlawful.
If you’d like any help navigating the process of developing robust candidate personas, book an appointment with Chezz to discuss. Best of luck with your audience targeting journey.
Enjoyed this article? Then you may enjoy reading 7 Essential Candidate Engagement Techniques.