Selecting the right talent for your company or team has a significant and lasting impact on your business.

In today’s marketplace, attracting strong candidates who align with your organization’s values and can effectively carry your company’s mission forward is challenging, primarily because getting their attention can be difficult.

At KVA, one of the methods we use to break through the clutter is targeting. Targeting is a foundational marketing activity – but the targeting we’re focused on here goes deeper. It involves creating candidate personas to allow you to communicate more effectively with your target audience.

When it comes to reaching your audience – whether that audience is made up of prospective talent, potential customers or even current employees – there are two ways to think about targeting.

Targeting for accurate distribution

This is the type of targeting we think of traditionally – and it’s critical. In recruitment marketing campaigns, we set various parameters like years of work experience, past job titles, education or key skills. Using these targeting selections ensures that job ads or sponsored content reach the people most likely to be qualified for open roles.

Targeting for true connection

Ultimately, this is what we all want – to go further than simply reaching qualified candidates and drive connection, interest and action. We believe that involves grounding the content you’re sharing in key insights about the target audience. Building your messaging points about the needs and interests of your target will unlock a new level of connection, and you can gather the insights by developing candidate personas.

You’re setting all of your targeting parameters correctly to reach the right prospective talent – but once your content gets to them, is it really resonating? If not, a useful next step is to create candidate personas.

A candidate persona is a way to represent important insights about a target talent group. By developing a persona, or multiple personas for distinct talent groups, you can understand your desired candidates more fully. Through this stronger understanding, you can shape content and even recruitment outreach strategies to target them more effectively.

Developing a candidate persona is a qualitative research technique that can take your recruitment marketing efforts to the next level. While it does take time and planning, here is a general approach that we use at KVA when we’re developing candidate personas in partnership with our clients.

1. Identify candidate persona groups
2. Prepare a list of individuals to interview as a part of your research process
3. Select an interviewer
4. Create your interview questions
5. Synthesize the information gathered to identify themes and insights

Identify candidate persona groups

While this research is valuable and candidate personas could be created for each and every functional area or category of roles, it’s good to start with your top priorities to ensure the research process will be manageable and can be readily applied. Think about the types of roles your organization will be recruiting for most frequently. Are there particular functional areas that will have many open roles for the foreseeable future? Is your company focusing on recruiting early career talent within a specific department? The more specific your candidate persona is, the better (ex: early career procurement professional), the more precise and impactful it can be.

Prepare a list of individuals to interview as a part of your research process

It’s helpful to interview relatively recent hires – those who have joined in the past 18 months – since they will be able to better recount their recent job search process. We aim to interview 4-6 people (the more the better!) for each persona group so that we can spot trends across responses. Additionally, including hiring managers, recruiters and senior functional area leaders in your interviews will provide a view into what they’re hearing from job seekers and recent hires.

Select an interviewer

Choosing a neutral third party, such as a member of your communications agency team, to conduct the interviews can help interviewees feel comfortable sharing complete and authentic information about not only their job search experience, but their experience as a new hire within your organization.

Create your interview questions

Interview questions should uncover the candidate mindset during the job search process or even before they actively start that process. Ask your interviewees about:

• What they were seeking when they were looking for a job and found the role in your organization
• Pain points they experienced in their prior organization
• Recruitment expectations and memorable moments
• Job seeking touchpoints they used frequently (websites, events, etc.)

Synthesize the information gathered to identify themes and insights

As you hear from interviewees, similarities will emerge. As you consider the themes, dig into the key insights that are true about each candidate persona group. Doing this will enable you to create a list of needs (a blend of what they were seeking in a role or company and the pain points they were trying to move away from), recruitment expectations and opportunities to stand out, and the job search touchpoints that will be most effective with this group. As you pull the list together, think about how to merchandise the information in a way that will allow your internal teams to act on these valuable insights – is it a PowerPoint deck, an infographic, or something else? Including key quotes from and images of some of your interviewees can bring the final package to life even more!

Now that you have your personas in place, you can create powerful, connection-driving content by pairing audience insights with what you have to offer – your employer value proposition, or EVP. This combination of personas + EVP will truly take your employer branding efforts to the next level.