Leveraging Personas to aid Recruitment
In our earlier post, we shared our thoughts on how data-driven personas can add the much needed value to attitudinal segmentation.The power of “personas” can be leveraged not just in traditional consumer marketing, but across other functional areas such as “franchisees”, “agencies”, “sales force”, etc.
We recently noted a similar parallel in the recruitment space.
There is little doubt on how recruiting continues to receive a keen attention from human resources function of every organization. ‘Who makes a good hire?’ and ‘Who is best armed to succeed at the firm?’ are questions that recruiters are constantly trying to answer. Recruitment is vital not only because it helps the organization meet its objective of talent acquisition but also because recruitment decisions impact the overall firm performance.
Given this context, we wanted to understand how an employee’s pre- joining profile (educational qualification, prior work experience, source of hiring, joining level) impacts her performance at the firm. For this, we applied rigorous data analytics techniques (decision tree algorithm) to
a. Classify the employee pool into various performance based segments – high, average and low performers.
b. Identify the variables that best discriminate one segment of employees from the other.
Based on our segmentation approach, we helped the recruiting team by creating personas to represent different employee segments. (For more thoughts on segmentation, click here). In this case, a persona is a profile sketch of the ‘desired hire’ from the perspective of required skill sets, behavioral and attitudinal characteristics. Segmentation and creation of personas proved to be a vital exercise for the following reasons:
a. The first step to effective recruiting is to fully understand the type of employees the firm wants to hire in terms of required skill sets, behavioral and cultural fit; personas help different stakeholders in the process including recruiters, interviewers, search firms, recruiting agents, share consistent understanding on the desired hire.
b. Personas give a well rounded description of the employee by covering attitudinal and behavioral characteristics; this knowledge can be effectively leveraged by recruiters in answering questions like ‘how do we reach the potential candidate?’, ‘what kind of media should we use to advertise job postings?’ and so on. This results in fast and speedy sourcing of candidates.
c. Most importantly, personas are data driven and an outcome of rigorous analytics. To that extent, it simply shows what has worked and what has not worked for the firm in the past.
As the authors in ‘The Risky Business of Hiring Stars’ rightly point out, hitching your wagon to the rising stars is not the solution to a recruiter’s woes. It is imperative for recruiters to devise specific tailor made recruitment strategies for different roles and profiles. Employee segmentation and persona creation is a key step in this direction.
Last but not the least, the prerequisite for the success of this analysis is the data itself. Firms need to start or continue investing in the right kind of performance management softwares that continuously track and maintain employee performance metrics.
