Candidates are looking for personalized information as they navigate the job search process. New grads, working parents, someone looking to switch to a new industry, and a person with disabilities all have unique questions and needs in their future job. 

Your job is to create recruitment marketing content that makes candidates feel understood. Building candidate personas is critical to this process and enables you to wow candidates with personalized content.

What is a Candidate Persona?

A candidate persona is a fictional person who represents your ideal job candidate for a given position. In order to create a candidate persona, recruitment marketers interview current team members who are thriving in that position. What is their background? What motivates them professionally? How do they spend their free time?

Researching current employees helps you better understand your ideal candidate. Then, create targeted recruitment marketing content that will resonate with this audience. 

Here are some tips: 

Ask About Their Background: Female Welders at BAE Systems

BAE Systems wanted to attract more female welders to the team. So, they interviewed female welders within their organization to better understand this audience. That’s where we met Lashika. 

Lashika sets up her story with a confession: “I wasn’t like the average girl growing up.” She then tells us about a career day outing where she first encountered welding. The rest is history:

BAE uses this video to attract female talent on college campuses. They hope to build connections with other young women who “aren’t like the average girl,” too. \

Be Open to the Unexpected: Interns at Dell

Persona research is about uncovering the truth, not accomplishing an agenda. Be open to the unexpected!

We interviewed 16 current and past summer interns at Dell. We entered the interview day expecting to hear a lot of stories around empowering work and flexible schedules (we did). 

What we didn’t expect? How passionate the interns were about the open door policy at Dell. We uncovered a ton of stories on the topic and decided to turn it into its own video: 

Understand the Whole Person: Work/Life Balance at CVS Health

The Pharmacy Benefits Management (PBM) team at CVS Health wanted to attract a specific candidate: someone with traditional consulting experience looking for the stability of a corporate position. The current team was mostly ex-consultants with the drive for complex problem solving, just not the schedule to keep up with the travel. The dynamic worked well, and they were looking for candidates who shared similar histories and goals. 

Communicating the work/life balance piece was key to forming a strong connection with the right candidate. See how we brough Will’s personality to life:

Wow candidates with personalized recruitment marketing content

Candidate personas help recruitment marketers tap into the questions and motivations that are driving candidates’ job search. Let this deep understanding inspire your content creation to create ultra-personalized recruitment marketing content.

The result? The right candidate will be wowed by how well you understand their unique needs and will become instantly connected to your brand.