Candidate Persona

What is a candidate persona?

A candidate persona is an in-depth description of the qualifications, skills, and personal traits that a company would ideally like a candidate to have when seeking a new hire for a position. It is a key hiring tool as it enables a hiring manager to quickly and clearly identify those candidates whose applications are most closely aligned with the candidate persona. These candidates can then be invited for interview, with the candidate persona being employed once again to determine whether the applicant has the relevant experience and qualifications, as well as a sufficient understanding of the duties they will be expected to perform in the new job. If used correctly, this should speed up the company’s time to hire, as only suitable candidates are considered for the role. It also enables hiring managers to refine their recruiting strategy, eliminating unnecessary steps and keeping the recruitment funnel streamlined — itself a critical step towards providing a rewarding candidate experience and boosting the company’s reputation as a good employer.

Why is a candidate persona important?

A candidate persona is a gateway to finding the right candidate for the job. Setting out qualifications, personal values, experience, expertise and more, it gives hiring managers plenty of material to work with when navigating the recruitment funnel.

There are five key ways that a company, its hiring manager(s), and the recruiting team can benefit from a strong candidate persona:

It enables you to target the right talent

A well-written persona informs everything from job postings to advertisements to sourcing strategies. It also offers insights into the most suitable channels and networks to use in order to spread the word about the position. The more accurate the persona is, the more targeted a recruiter can be when it comes to attracting candidates.

It streamlines your hiring process

A candidate persona serves as a guide for you to evaluate candidates quickly, efficiently, and thoroughly, ensuring the focus is always on finding the qualifications, skills, and personality traits that are required for the position. It also cuts down on time spent on unsuitable candidates.

It enhances your candidate experience

Having a thorough understanding of your ideal candidate makes it easier to speak to applicants on their level, in a manner that is engaging both for you and them. It allows you to ask targeted, interesting questions and present value propositions that are likely to resonate with the candidate. This all serves to enrich the candidate experience.

It consolidates your team’s expectations

If everyone in the team or department can consult the same candidate persona, then their idea about the ideal candidate will be (at least roughly) aligned. This eliminates unwelcome surprises further along the recruitment and/or onboarding process and minimizes discord when it comes to deciding which candidate to hire.

It supports diversity and inclusion

Crafting a candidate persona can be a good way to eliminate unconscious bias from the recruitment process. If you have a set of criteria in front of you that focuses on objective qualities — qualifications, skills, personal values, and experience —this minimizes the risk of allowing irrelevant factors to creep into the decision-making process. It paves the way for a fair, inclusive hiring strategy that your company can be proud of — and one that will boost its reputation as a good employer.

How to use a candidate persona

When prepared correctly, a candidate persona can be used for everything from writing job descriptions to aiding the interview process. At a minimum, a candidate persona should answer the questions below. Use this as the basis for preparing your first candidate persona template:

• WHO the ideal candidate is
  What should their current occupation be? How much professional experience should they have? Where are they currently based? Which competitors have they worked for? What qualifications do they have? What is their background?
  
  
• WHAT the candidate is bringing to the role
  What key skills do they need? What relevant professional experience do they have? What personality traits would serve them well? How will they fit into the team?
  
  
• WHY the candidate wants to join the company
  What do they know about the company history? What impresses them most? What do they hope to achieve? What are their professional goals?
  
  
• WHICH values the candidate embodies
  What unshakeable core values do they have? How do they work? Are they a team player? Do they practice these values outside of the workplace?
  
  
• WHAT objections the candidate may bring to the table
  What are their salary expectations? Do they need to relocate if they receive the position? What benefits do they want? What is the strategy to pursue a very strong candidate if they turn down the role?

Four advantages of a candidate persona

Creating one or more candidate personas is a relatively simple task that nevertheless yields multiple benefits for hiring managers, candidates, and the company as a whole.

Advantage 1

Find the right person for the job quicker

If you set out the qualifications, soft skills, experience, and personality that you want your ideal candidate to have, this will make it much easier to identify these traits and qualities when the right candidate applies for the role. There is no risk of overlooking key qualifications or skills, because they are written down in clear terms in the persona. This also gives you more time (e.g., during an initial interview) to drill down into the candidate’s experience and history and use behavioral interviewing techniques to determine whether they only sound good on paper — or if they’re the real deal.

Advantage 2

Keep the recruitment funnel as short as possible

A targeted candidate persona filters out unqualified applicants and ideally encourages top talent to apply. This keeps the number of applications manageable and ensures only those candidates who appear to fit the bill are invited to interview. As a result, the recruitment funnel remains compact and ultimately speeds up the time to hire — a key metric when determining the success of your wider recruitment process.

Advantage 3

Enhance the candidate experience

A well-written candidate persona can likewise enhance the candidate experience, as it enables the hiring manager to quickly identify those candidates who are not suitable. This decision can be communicated to the candidate in a timely, respectful manner, allowing them to continue their job search without delay. At the same time, suitable candidates are invited for interview and assessed promptly, as the hiring manager has no need to second-guess whether the candidate is a good fit — after all, they wrote the candidate persona in the first place.

Advantage 4

Targeted recruitment equals lower costs

A streamlined recruitment process eliminates unnecessary spending on refinement or restructuring at a later stage. Contrast this with a basic job description that could potentially attract hundreds of applicants, and the benefit here is clear.

Best practices

Creation

When creating your candidate personas, ensure that all templates follow the same structure and layout. This creates a high level of standardization, which can then be applied in equal measure to the job description and the interviewing process. While the content will necessarily differ across each role, department, and division, each persona should strive to answer all the questions listed in the section “How to use a candidate persona”.

Review

Refining a candidate persona depends first and foremost on the preferences of the hiring manager who uses it. After applying the persona across several interviews, they will be able to see where the persona is lacking and how it can be improved based on real-life input from candidates. While there is no standard for how often a candidate persona should be updated, it’s helpful to review a persona either:

• At the end of a successful recruitment cycle — your insights into the ideal candidate are still fresh in your mind, making it a good time to update the candidate persona in preparation for the next hiring process.
  
  
• If a recruitment cycle is protracted or not yielding the desired results — it may be the case that the candidate persona is too narrow or unrealistic for the role being advertised. Consider updating it (along with the job description) to see if this has an impact on the outcome.
  
  
• Prior to a new recruitment cycle — industries evolve quickly, and a candidate persona that was up to date even a few months ago may now be obsolete. This is why it is a good idea to review the persona prior to embarking on a new hiring process. It will save time in the long term and should help you find the right candidate quicker.

Feedback

Another good practice is to establish a feedback structure if the candidate persona is used by multiple recruiters (rather than a single hiring manager). Whether as a questionnaire, email request, or platform prompt, this feedback can prove highly valuable when reviewing and refining candidate personas ahead of a subsequent recruitment cycle.

It’s important to keep in mind that every market is dynamic and evolving, which makes it important to refine your candidate persona on an ongoing basis to reflect new needs, skills, and traits. Consult market research, speak to the departmental head and team members, and use the data generated as part of the recruitment process to inform the candidate persona.

In addition, be sure to keep the number of candidate personas manageable. Rather than creating a new one each time a position becomes available, take an existing template and tailor it to the role. This reduces the amount of work involved, reduces confusion, and eliminates the risk of becoming too narrow in scope and potentially excluding candidates who would otherwise have been suitable for the position. Remember: a candidate persona is a hiring tool to be used to inform your decision — not an inflexible mold to be filled by the candidate.