Using Candidate Personas for Recruiting at Scale

Do the metrics from your recruitment marketing campaign tell a story of success? Maybe you're not sure what might indicate success. I invited Katrina Kibben to speak with me and share her insight into helping organizations reach their recruitment marketing goals. Kibben is Recruitment Marketing Consultant at Three Ears Media.

Read more takeaways from this interview at www.collegerecruiter.com/blog/2018/05/22/the-hard-decisions-to-make-when-your-recruitment-marketing-campaign-didnt-produce-the-results-you-wanted

What does it take to run a successful recruitment marketing campaign?  Katrina Kibben: Recruiters have so much going on. I'm finding that many are taking a blanket recruitment marketing strategy approach. That is, the typical big agency comes in and says, “you need more at the top of the funnel. You need more people to come to your website and apply for the jobs.” And they take a blanket approach to that. And I think that there's something fundamentally wrong with that. Recruiters shouldn’t take strategies [that work for someone else] and apply them as rule for everyone.

Instead, recruitment marketing should operate from the fundamental belief that every person is special and that there is a great person and a great personality for your job. If we take the time to discover that first, we can create great recruitment marketing that will compel the right person to apply, not just a warm body. If you target everyone, you are not targeting anybody.

You have to listen first. When you listen, you compile data, right? It starts with interviewing the best people who have had that job and trying to find what's similar among all of those people or what's fundamental to all of those people.

Recruitment marketing personas are important especially for high volume and low retention roles like those in call centers. Those are the roles where if you did something different at the beginning, it could really change your whole business. I love those. And that's where the personas really fit in is because they give you the strategy. They tell you what to say and how to say it to get the right person.

What should organizations actually be measuring and holding themselves accountable for? Kibben: There's not one right answer. You have to know your bottom line. You need to know what the ultimate goal is, what the ultimate outcome is. A lot of people start campaigns without that answer. So long term overall, [choose] five things that matter the most to you that will ultimately tell you that you succeeded short term. Take those five things and you break them down into smaller items. For example, time-to-fill. Change your careers website to improve that. Ask yourself, “What are the three things I'm going to do on my career website that contribute to time-to-fill?” Have a baseline to compare and if you don't already have that data, go online and find it. If time-to-fill is your thing, go out and find the industry standard, put that as your target and try to cut it down.

If you want to stand out, you have to do something completely different.

This especially resonates with students and grads because they have the desire to really connect with their employers. Organizations need to try to get into their heads and their hearts and not do what everybody else does. They won't connect well and it creates the expectation for the younger generation that this is just a job. It reinforces what we've always been told about work: you just show up, you do what you're told to do, and then you go home or you find a better job. That's the expectation you set when you look exactly like everyone else. ​

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