The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many businesses across the world to temporarily shut down. While this unprecedented event may be causing you a lot of stress, you should use your time during confinement in productive ways. Since you now surely have more free time than usual, you can use it to determine how to either improve your business or come up with a rock-solid plan for starting a company. No matter what you’re planning on doing, you will need to find good employees.
Keep in mind that you shouldn’t start the interview process before you determine what your ideal candidate would look like. It’s a bad idea to interview potential employees without knowing exactly what you’re looking for and hope that the right person will apply for the job. To make your recruiting more efficient, you should consider creating a candidate persona.
What Is a Candidate Persona?
Even if you’ve never heard of this term before, you’re most likely familiar with buyer personas – semi-fictional profiles that allow marketers to see the behavior and qualities of their ideal customers. Similarly, a candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of the type of person that would be an ideal candidate for a certain job function at your company. To create a candidate persona, you will have to determine exactly which characteristics are important to you. Some of the main characteristics employers look for in employees include:
- Communication skills
- Education
- Work experience
- Geographical location
- Flexibility
- Cooperative skills
- Dependability
- Work ethic
- Professional goals
- Organizational skills
If you’re already thinking that creating a candidate persona is a complex task, you’re right. Nevertheless, it will pay off in the long run. Hiring the right employees will ensure that everything runs smoothly in your company. You likely won’t have to lay off any workers soon and your staff members will know how to efficiently collaborate. In essence, creating a candidate persona leaves no room for experimentation when you’re hiring someone. You’ll know what you’re looking for and you will easily be able to identify your ideal candidates during the interview process. But before you start interviewing anyone, you need to learn how to create your candidate persona.
How to Create a Candidate Persona?
Now that you have an idea of what a candidate persona is, it’s time to start creating one. Remember that you want to know in advance which qualities and qualifications your ideal candidate should have. With that being said, the most important part of creating a candidate persona is research. Once you do this, you’ll have to analyze the data you collected to identify common traits and trends. The third step is to survey every person who is either involved in the hiring process or will spend a lot of time working with the new hire. Finally, you should incorporate the candidate persona you developed in your recruitment strategy. If you’re not sure how to do any of these steps, here’s a more in-depth guide on how to create a candidate persona.
Research
Because you’ve chosen to create a candidate persona, you shouldn’t try to assume what the right candidate would look like. Assumptions and instincts don’t play any part in this type of recruitment strategy. Instead, you should focus on researching and collecting real data. Your first step should be to gather data that you have easy access to. This means researching the information you have on successful hires you made in the past. Find out more about their goals, how often they learn new skills, what keeps them motivated, as well as how productive they have to maintain or improve their job performance.
Doing thorough research will help you learn a lot about what the important characteristics found in your candidate persona. Let’s say you want to hire a marketing specialist. One of the first things you should do is talk to the people who currently handle your marketing and find out what skills they possess. Make sure to also check whether they are lacking knowledge in some fields. For example, they may know how to set up an excellent social media marketing campaign but aren’t that great at search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing.
Your candidate persona needs to fill any gaps you may currently have within your business. Your ideal candidate may not be the most experienced or skilled person that applied. As long as the interviewee can bring something to the table that you currently don’t have but need, you should consider giving them the job.
Analyze the Data
After you’ve completed the research phase and compiled all the necessary data, it’s time to analyze it. As you probably already know, you can learn a lot simply by talking to your current employees. When you organize and analyze the data you have, you’ll be able to figure out some of the main qualities they all share. To make sure that you hire the right person, the candidate you choose should share the same qualities.
Once the hiring process begins, you’ll be able to learn a lot of information about the candidates simply by knowing in advance what you’d like to hear. If their ambitions, goals, motivations, productivity, and work ethic matches that of your top employees, you should consider them for the job.
Survey Stakeholders and Team Members
You can do the research and analyzing yourself, but once that’s done it is time to involve other people in the process of creating a candidate persona. Any person who has a stake in the hiring process or will work closely with the new employee should have the opportunity to voice their expectations. The candidate persona strategy will work only if you take into account both objective and subjective requirements for the position.
Aside from learning more about the candidates’ work experience, skills, education, and other similar factors, it’s equally important to finding out more about their personality. After all, you want to hire someone that will fit in with the rest of your employees. That’s why you should ask candidates about some of their personal goals, favorite hobbies, what they like to read, and how they spend their time on the internet.
Sometimes it won’t be easy to find out much about your candidates’ personality traits simply by asking them a few questions. With that being said, you should consider giving each potential employee a personality test as part of the hiring process. This will help you see whether an interviewee is a good fit for your company culture and give you more insight into their communication style. By analyzing the results of these personality tests, you will determine which qualities and traits your ideal candidate possesses.
Incorporate the Candidate Persona in Your Recruitment Strategy
When you successfully define your candidate persona you should incorporate it into your recruitment strategy. Use it for job descriptions and paid ads to attract the best fit for the position. To maximize your success in future recruitment efforts, create a different candidate persona for each new job opening. Make sure that everyone involved in the hiring process is familiar with your candidate persona. This will help them determine how to talk about the position with potential candidates.
Conclusion
Hiring someone based on your instinct is always a huge gamble. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for in an employee, you might make the wrong decision and that could cost you a lot. You’ll lose time in training a person who isn’t a good fit at your company, which will harm the firm’s overall productivity.
Author Bio: James Murphy is a writer working at My-Assignment.help in the academic writing field. He has been working with the essay writing service at EssayWritingLand for over five years. Other than writing, his other interests are having fun with his two lovely toddlers and catch up on all New York Yankees games.
