Recruitment MarketingUse This Easy Checklist to Build Your Company’s Talent Persona
Recruitment Marketing

Use This Easy Checklist to Build Your Company’s Talent Persona

Unfortunately, most HR departments believe that once the job posting goes live, it would only be a matter of time before the perfect candidate walks through the door! It’s not such a cakewalk for organizations in today’s highly competitive job market. In this article, we list out the criteria you can use to build your company’s talent persona.

Only those employers that have done their due diligence and research on talent personas can be smug about attracting the top talent in their industry. 

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    There is growing evidence that organizations are leveraging talent personas to boost their visibility as an employer brand to reckon with. If companies want to attract top talent, they should go all out to create authentic candidate personas aligned with the kind of employees they seek to onboard.

    For example, Capgemini recommends designing the candidates’ onboarding journey by building a fictitious archetypal applicant profile.

     
    Moreover, well thought-through talent personas aid in boosting a company’s Employee Value
    Proposition (EVP). For employers who take the people they hire seriously, the below approach provides a roadmap for building talent personas. This, in turn, would facilitate in discovering the ideal talents for their company.

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    #1. Follow a data-led approach to crafting your talent persona:

    Insights into the ideal hire is possible only if organizations adopt a data-led approach to employee onboarding. It pays to segment the potential employees using real data available through the company’s existing HR processes.
     
    A powerful talent persona can be created by gathering salient performance metrics for
    current employees who are high performers. Data on demographics, career needs, salary expectations, education, professional accreditations, skills, experience and background must be studied in detail before drafting the job description.
     
    The required competency profile and recruiting strategy should be developed only after creating the talent persona through smart data analytics.
     
    For example, Heineken created a memorable campaign called ‘Go places’ to showcase the unique attributes and aspirations of their employees.

    #2. Address gaps in Diversity & Inclusion:

     
    When organizations build data-led talent personas, they are able to better address existing gaps in their diversity hiring practices. Ensuring a diverse candidate pool is essential to cultivating a unique competitive advantage for the company.

    In today’s social media age, candidates read company reviews posted on Glassdoor, AmbitionBox and
    similar sites as part of their research about a prospective employer. Chances are, if your company is
    rated low in the D&I metrics, you could risk alienating stellar talent—especially members of Gen Z who highly value D&I—right at the start of the candidate journey.

    If you wish to attract the ideal candidate, ensure your workplace is also ideal in terms of reflecting your D&I culture.
     
    You can build diversity into your talent persona by ensuring your social channels, job descriptions and other internal and external communications reflect robust workplace diversity that promote inclusive behaviour.
     
    For example, Shopify walks the talk when it comes to nurturing a culture of D&I. From collaborative spaces to townhall meetings to events such as Hack Days, Shopify encourages
    diverse perspectives, which is possible only because its hiring practices are inclusive.

    #3. Talent is never static:

     
    If you are a fast-moving company, it pays to remember that talent personas are dynamic and change according to industry trends. For example, in the past, innovations came at a slower pace and software developers limited their expertise to only one programming language.

    However, according to a recent study, the tech skills that are most in demand today are blockchain, Unity 3D, cyber security and AR/VR, among others. If developers lack these skills, they will stand to lose
    out on many lucrative opportunities.

    HR leaders focused on building talent personas should ensure their workforce is provided enough opportunities to skill and upskill to remain relevant in the job market. This will enable the organization to remain customer focused and stay ahead of their competition, too.

    #4. Amplify talent persona stories:

    We urge employers to start leveraging their company’s career page to their advantage.

    Video testimonials and blogs from current and former employees would enhance the HR’s understanding of the needs of employees and, thereby, attract new talents.

    Positive employee stories can give a fillip to an organization’s employer brand. By amplifying employee stories, hiring managers develop a better understanding of the top performers and the characteristics that are relevant for their roles. This, in turn, would attract the most meritorious candidates into the organization.

    Accenture sets a high bar in building its employer brand. Its career page has a section dedicated to employee testimonials that projects the company in positive light.

    Today’s organizations cannot afford to rest easy after a successful product or service launch. They have a larger purpose to fulfill in the corporate world. They need to remain focused on the well-being of prospective, current and former employees at all times.

    Their recruitment strategy should identify suitable persona templates that would ease the talent acquisition process. By creating a candidate persona, companies are able to find the perfect fit for various roles and enhance their recruitment marketing metrics, such as time taken to hire and cost of hiring.

    Once organizations start getting into the habit of building candidate personas, it is almost a certainty that the right talent would ultimately walk through the door.

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