A few years ago, I hit a bit of a brick wall when it came to cementing strong relationships with candidates.
I was advertising in all the right places (I thought), sharing the right messages (I thought), but still things weren’t clicking.
What was missing? I needed a way to really see things from the candidate’s perspective, to think how they think and realise emotions they might feel. Although I didn’t know it at the time, what I needed was a Candidate Persona Map.
What is a Candidate Persona Map?
A Customer Persona Map is a tool that has been used in Marketing for some time to truly understand a target audience so that companies can sell to them more effectively.
A Candidate Persona Map is the same idea as the Customer Persona Map adapted to the Recruitment Marketing space.
Here is an example of a candidate persona map — just click to enlarge to view the example up close.
Click to enlarge Candidate Persona Map Template
Why use Candidate Persona Maps?
The main aim with this tool is to get inside the candidate’s shoes, consider what really matters to them and build rapport by understanding their issues/drivers. Doing this work will help you to craft better messaging and improve the candidate journey for your target candidate groups.
Rally Note: Creating a candidate persona map for your key job families and roles is an important Recruitment Marketing strategy that will target your recruitment efforts. If you’d like our best-practice template to create candidate personas, along with 5 sample candidate personas to get you started, you can download Rally’s free Candidate Persona Template here.
How to create a Candidate Persona Map
A Candidate Persona Map naturally looks a bit different from the Customer Persona Map.
I looked long and hard for the perfect template to use and, after giving up, I decided to create my own – and am happy to share it with you, Rally community!
Aside from covering the demographic details, my Candidate Persona map (which I also call a People Persona Map to support my idea of a People Proposition) focuses on 4 main areas:
- What are a candidate’s personal background, goals, motivations, values and challenges?
- Do their professional motivations differ from their personal?
- What does their online behaviour look like?
- What would a job search look like for them?
Fairly straightforward, right? But really effective too, I promise. I’d recommend, once completed, that you save your Persona Maps in an easy-to-access spot and reference them often when creating content or improving candidate touchpoints.
It’s also worth revisiting and updating your personas every year or so, to make sure that they stay up to date and relevant.
Why should you take the time to do this exercise?
Put simply, because you’ll be able to create more compelling Recruitment Marketing content that grabs the attention of your target talent audiences!
Here’s how Candidate Persona Maps have worked for me:
In my role at Yodel, Candidate Persona Maps have been used extensively to improve how we attract and hire drivers.
Through mapping exercises, we’ve learned that our drivers typically prefer mobile-optimised communication and that job security is a big motivator. From those points alone (and many others) we have been able to tailor our attraction and employer branding messaging to ensure we are hitting the right tones when it comes to building and maintaining relationships.
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Looking for more guidance on creating great Recruitment Marketing content for all your candidate personas? We recommend that you consider taking our 1 hour virtual course that teaches you how to create Recruitment Marketing content using a methodology that maps content directly to the candidate journey.
It will save you tons of time by showing you exactly how to create a recruitment content plan for every stage in the candidate journey and ensure that your content directly addresses the needs and questions of your candidate personas during their job search and your candidate experience. You can learn more about our 1 hour virtual course Rally Content Rescue here.
