Creating a Relevant Career Page Through Candidate Personas: Good or Bad Idea?

Every company dreams of finding the ideal candidate. But how? By using a clever method that will help you attract the perfect profile during your recruitments: creating a "candidate persona". You can also use this fictional character to write better job offers and develop a tailored website. Discover in this article how to create a relevant career page through candidate personas and the benefits of this method for your recruitment processes.

What is a candidate persona?

In the inbound recruiting family, we present the candidate persona! But who is this? This virtual character is nothing other than the ideal candidate's profile. The one who has all the qualities, education, skills (soft skills, hard skills, and mad skills), or experiences essential to what you're looking for. This is the one who perfectly fits the vacant position. Of course, this candidate only exists in your dreams. It's THE target you want to reach and the type of profile you'd like to recruit.

How to identify your ideal candidate?

Identifying candidate personas is real investigative work. For this, you'll need to ask the right questions and conduct interviews or surveys. Indeed, this fictional character is far from abstract and relies on in-depth analyses.

👉 To help you, you can, for example:

• Observe your employees and question them about what motivates them most;

• Interview managers about the profiles they'd like to see in their teams;

• Analyze candidates to understand through which channel they applied and why they sent their resume.

👉 You can then create your ideal candidate's profile by imagining:

• their biography,

• their professional life,

• their interests,

• their social media usage,

• the sites where they look for jobs.

💡To remember: this persona must represent the candidate you want to attract to your company. You'll need one for each type of position.

3 advantages of creating candidate personas for your career page

Target to recruit better

By targeting the candidates you'd like to recruit, you limit casting errors and you attract the best talents! For this, you'll need to look for them in the right place and know how to reach them.

👉 So, to target your audience... or rather the candidates, we advise you to:

• Write relevant and impactful job offers in which they will recognize themselves;

• Select the right distribution channels: generalist or specialized job boards, social networks, search engines, or websites and career pages... it's up to you to be strategic;

• Define your recruitment strategy thanks to your ideal candidate, and therefore, the message you want to transmit to your targets.

Save time thanks to candidate personas

Thanks to your candidate persona, you save considerable time in your recruitment process. Indeed, it allows you to reach quality talents. You thus spend less time sorting through irrelevant resumes or conducting interviews with the wrong candidates.

Secondly, your recruitments will be more reliable and your collaborators will adapt much faster to your company's culture. Finally, the time invested in creating personas is quickly profitable for a healthy company and motivated employees.

💡 You thus optimize costs and management of your recruitments.

Seduce candidates more quickly and easily

By knowing what pleases your ideal candidate, what motivates them, and what they expect from their future job, you'll have all the arguments to convince them to apply in just a few sentences. This simply follows the principle of buyer personas found in marketing. And yes, what works in this field often works perfectly in recruitment.

💡 Thus, if you recruit on LinkedIn by sending personalized messages, you'll certainly have more positive returns!

Qualified candidates close to your company culture

By taking the time to define the rare gem's profile, you'll also have taken the time to get to know your teams in depth, their tastes, or their personality. Your ideal candidate's profile will be built on this foundation. Thus, new recruits will integrate more quickly and will be more aligned with the rest of your collaborators.

The "tools" to create a relevant career page through candidate personas

Using recruitment software equipped with an ATS

To simplify your life and avoid technical constraints, you can use recruitment software, such as Jobaffinity, linked to your website or career page, and it's even better if it's equipped with an ATS (Applicant Tracking System). This will allow you to easily distribute your job offers on selected channels according to your candidate personas and streamline user experience.

An attractive design

You know your target by heart: their tastes, interests, way of speaking... So why not use this for your career website's design? As you know, a company's logo, colors, or images present represent your employer brand. But it's also what will attract qualified profiles to apply for you. All collected elements should allow you to create a unique career page that's easy to navigate.

💡 Our advice: Don't hesitate to test your career page with your audience to ensure it meets their expectations.

In conclusion, this method's objective is to place humans at the heart of your communication and imagine a website based on your target to capture their attention! Thus, creating a relevant career page through candidate personas is long-term work. No doubt this will quickly bear fruit and allow you to recruit exceptional talents.