At New Home Star, we’re always on the look-out for the very best sales people to join our rapidly growing team.
To help with our mission of attracting the best talent from across the U.S., we set out to define the personas of the types of people who were most likely to excel in our open roles.
After defining our candidate personas, we also set up some specific Recruitment Marketing campaigns intended to attract this group.
Here’s the scoop on how we put our personas together, the Recruitment Marketing campaigns we set up afterward and the types of results we’ve seen to date.
Building out our candidate personas
I lead up the marketing team at New Home Star. To build out our candidate personas, we partnered closely with HR to learn more about the top performers at our organization – so we could attract more people like them.
Together we looked at the commonly recurring patterns and characteristics that our 20 most successful new hires in the past 12 months possessed.
We looked through the LinkedIn profiles of these successful hires to see what their backgrounds looked like and what features we could group together to segment them. We then identified educational backgrounds they had and what industries and role types they worked in before New Home Star.
We ended up with three persona types that emerged from this research:
1. The business athlete
The Business Athlete persona defines individuals who have an exceptional work ethic that was built from being an athlete in college. They’re quite good at making things happen, no matter the barrier. Our ideal candidates are not from D1 schools and typically come from smaller colleges. Their degrees are mostly in business and sports management. We’ve also found that they have mentorship and volunteer activities as part of their resume. Finally, they have enough experience in real estate to be familiar with the business model, but not so much where they can’t be molded into the ideal New Home Star sales agent. This typically translates into 2-4 years of experience in our industry.
2. The social energizer
This tends to be an extroverted person with a lot of energy. People in this group tend to come from a Sales background. Most commonly, they come from sales in telecommunication, or real estate organizations like Keller Williams. We are looking for similar amounts of experience in the industry as the business athlete, as well as mentorship and volunteer activity.
3. The business professional
Because we have such an attractive compensation structure with New Home Star, we’re able to attract a lot of folks with MBAs or other advanced degrees. These individuals have historically performed very well with us, so we continue to target this group. With advanced degrees come expensive bills. Our offering of high compensation is what attracts these candidates the most.
How we created campaigns geared towards these personas
As most of us who do Recruitment Marketing work know, the best candidates are almost never looking for a job. This is where our campaign strategy comes into play.
We started off our candidate persona specific campaign by building out landing pages geared towards each group. We built out these landing pages in house since we have a pretty sizeable marketing team here. Here’s a sneak peek at one of these pages:
Rally note: you can find out more about landing pages for Recruitment Marketing, in our new Rally How To Guide: 5 Landing Pages that Drive Candidates to Action.
Our recruiters leverage these landing pages with their sourcing efforts in order to grab the attention of prospective candidates they identify as a good fit. Using our ATS, Workable, along with their LinkedIn Recruiter seats, our recruiters track down great people that fit into our persona groups. They then reach out directly by email or InMail to explain the role that’s open and send the candidate a link to the landing page that corresponds to whichever persona group they fall into.
On the landing pages, candidates can leave their information to receive their free New Home Star career kit. This is a beautifully designed, personalized kit that gets mailed out to them. It has a matte finish, comes in an attractive box, and contains a brochure describing all the reasons that New Home Star is a great choice for the next step in their careers. Here’s a page from the brochure:
There’s also a call to action in the career kit that encourages candidates to find out more by having lunch with one of our team members. We’ll pair them up with another person in that persona group for a lunch so that our employees can share more about their experiences directly.
I hope that my team’s approach to defining candidate personas and building out campaigns around them has armed you with a bit more information to apply to your own Recruitment Marketing approach. Good luck and have fun!