Is Your Candidate Journey Costing You Great Hires? Let Your Personas Lead the Way. | Blog

Candidates expect more than a one-size-fits-all experience that doesn’t reflect their unique needs and motivations during the hiring process. And if they do get what feels like a generic candidate journey, they just might move on. This can be especially true for top talent who know their worth. Persona-led candidate journeys can play an essential part in helping your organization stand out and help build stronger connections with the people you hope to hire.

What Are Persona-Led Candidate Journeys?

A persona-led candidate journey is a strategic approach to recruitment that moves beyond demographics and a job description to tap into what truly drives candidates for a specific role or job type—their motivations, challenges and career aspirations.

The power of persona-led journeys lies in their ability to reinforce your employee value proposition (EVP) to ensure that every touchpoint—whether a job description, career site, social media content or recruiter conversation—feels personal, relevant and compelling to the right candidate.

Key Benefits of Persona-Led Candidate Journeys

Personalized Candidate Experience: Customizing content, job recommendations and messaging according to a candidate’s persona enriches the recruitment experience, making it more relevant and engaging to convert the candidate into your pipeline.
Increased Candidate Engagement: By presenting information and opportunities that align with a candidate’s career aspirations and stage in the hiring funnel, persona-led journeys foster deeper engagement with your organization.
Improved Job Matches: Personalized job recommendations ensure that candidates encounter roles that more closely match their skills, experience and career goals for a more positive—and less frustrating— candidate experience.
Strengthened Employer Brand: A recruitment process that acknowledges and addresses the individual needs of candidates strengthens the employer brand, showcasing the company as one that values and understands its applicants.

How to Craft Candidate Personas

Collect Insights and Information: Start the process by gathering data. This step involves delving into the backgrounds of past successful hires, engaging with current employees through surveys or interviews, and keeping an eye on prevailing industry trends. Aim to collect diverse details, such as demographic information, job preferences, motivations and aspirations related to their careers.

Create Segments: Organize your potential candidates into clear segments that share common attributes. These segments will serve as the groundwork for developing your candidate personas. Typical segments might encompass categories, such as recent college graduates, or be role-based, like a nurse specializing in critical care.

Highlight Challenges: Pinpoint the specific challenges and obstacles faced by candidates within each segment as they navigate their job search or seek career progression. These challenges could range from achieving a satisfactory work-life balance to meeting salary expectations to finding opportunities for career advancement.

Understand Aspirations and Drivers: Get to the heart of what propels candidates forward in each segment. Is it the pursuit of a rewarding career, the desire for swift professional growth, or the search for an employer whose values resonate with their own? Clarify their underlying motivations and objectives.

Build Rich Personas: Using the insights from your research and segmentation, construct comprehensive candidate personas. Assign each persona a name and a visual identity to bring them to life. Flesh out each persona with critical details, including their job title, educational background, career ambitions, key challenges, where they go for news and entertainment, and what motivates them. This step transforms abstract data into tangible, relatable profiles that can guide your recruitment strategy.

Implementing Persona-Led Candidate Journeys on Your Career Website

Implementing persona-led candidate journeys on your career site involves identifying key candidate personas, mapping out their typical journey from job discovery to application to conversion into a talent community, and pinpointing where personalization can have the most impact. Think about:

Improving ways to streamline navigation by creating easy pathways by persona.
Removing friction by tailoring the apply process to different experience levels and job types. Develop and deliver content that caters to each persona’s needs, whether through personalized job recommendations, company insights, testimonials or storytelling,
Adding rich content to job postings, such as a day in the life video, and authentic job expectations to encourage self-selection from candidates who might not be the right fit.

Utilizing analytics to track interactions across the journey will help you continuously optimize your persona-led journeys too.

The ROI of Persona-Led Candidate Journeys

In a recent Candidate Experience Report by Career Plug, 36% of job seekers said they have declined an offer because of a negative experience while 66% of candidates said that a positive experience influenced their decision to accept an offer. Adopting persona-led journeys yields significant improvements in recruitment outcomes, including higher application completion rates, improved candidate quality, reduced time-to-hire and stronger employer branding.