Why Your Recruitment Content Marketing Needs Candidate Personas, And How To Create Them

Radhika Sivadi

2 min read ·

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Once you have decided to embark on a recruitment content marketing strategy the next vital step is to identify the sort of candidates you want to attract – your ‘personas.’

The process of creating your personas is a chance to explore the sort of candidates you want to attract based on information you already have from previous successful hires: do common themes emerge in certain areas of your organisation regarding hires? Do they need a specific level of academic attainment? Do the majority fall into a certain age category? Talk to your human resources colleagues to get a full understanding of the skills and qualities required for the role.

The process of creating your personas is a chance to explore the sort of candidates you want to attract.

Once you’ve done that you can also make some educated guesses about your ideal candidates’ experience, career goals, motivation, and concerns. You can base these on what you already know and trends that emerge through research. Actually talking about them in this way will help you to articulate exactly who it is you want to hire.

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Would Bob like this?

What you want to do is come up with a set of bullets points that create an outline of an ideal candidate. You’ll most likely have more than one. Give them a name, so that you feel like you are speaking directly to them with content – would ‘Bob’ be interested in this blog post? Will ‘Jane’ find this article relevant? Any content that an audience feels is speaking to them (i.e. using work scenarios they find familiar; pop culture references they ‘get’) is going to resonate more deeply with them – once that happens you are already on your way to building a relationship with them. As a recruitment marketing agency, part of our work with clients is to then illustrate the personas so anyone working on content has a visual reminder of who it is they are talking to.

A key factor in your campaign is to communicate your EVP.

Use your personas to inform distribution and amplification

What we also like to do for our clients when we’re putting together personas is to think about the social media channels they might use (based on age, their purpose for being there); and what other media they may consume. This can inform your channel strategy later on. For example, what are they likely to want from a company? Is company culture going to be a selling point? If so, your company Facebook page should be about more than posting job vacancies – it should be a vibrant ‘window shop’ that features company away days, charity work, or parties. People ‘like’ parties.

Get the message across

A key factor in your recruitment strategy campaign is to communicate your employee value proposition (EVP) – with personas in mind, you can tailor your messaging so that you appeal to the right people at the right time.

This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Why Your Recruitment Content Marketing Needs Candidate Personas, And How To Create Them

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Radhika Sivadi