Create Employee Personas to Recruit Top Talent

Hello and thank you for joining us today. My name is Matt Beatty. I am the CEO of ERG Payroll and HR. You can find videos like this and more HR resources on our website at ergpayroll.com. Today we are going to talk about how and why to create employee personas for each of the roles within your organization. Why is this so important? I think this quote sums it up really well: "If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time." People waste so much time looking for the right person for their organization when they're really just hoping that the right person might find them. We post jobs, we use recruiters, we spend countless hours interviewing and screening only to end up with no one, or even worse, to hire the wrong person to fill fill the role. If you don't know what you are looking for, how on earth are you going to find it? Waiting for the right fit to walk in the door is like aiming at nothing every time. So today we're going to talk about what are employee personas, how can you use these personas to improve and accentuate your hiring process, and how do you create personas. And you can get the free template of this presentation with the guide and later on off of our website, ergpayroll.com, under free HR resources. So what is an employee persona? An employee persona is a fictional generalized representation of your ideal employee by the role. So this follows the same logic as marketing buyer personas. Any good marketing consultant will tell you to create a buyer or a client persona or an avatar so you can speak directly to your target audience when you are marketing your products or services. The same exact thing applies to recruiting. We have to imagine that our employment processes are a lot like our employment brand and treat them the same way that we do with marketing. The personas used to help you understand your potential employees better and make it easier for you to tailor your recruiting approach, your messaging, and even your compensation package towards what is important to the right candidate for a role. The strongest personas are generally based on former employees or research that you have conducted. This can be A-players that you've worked with in the past. This can be information that you find from friends or from other organizations that you're familiar with. And most roles will have multiple personas or variations. It is really important that you do not discriminate based on the persona that you put in place. What is a negative persona? Well, a negative persona are exclusionary personas that represent the type of person you don't want as an employee. So when you look at the ideal employee, you also have to know the qualities that make up the type of person you don't want on the team. This could include people who have no experience in customer service if you're hiring for a customer service role, or they don't have a particular degree that's really important for an entry-level position. Or maybe they just had multiple errors on their resume and it shows a lack of attention to detail in a role that requires a high level of attention to detail. You need to understand what the type of person looks like in their background that you don't want in the role. Oftentimes I've heard clients in the past where they've— maybe they've hired somebody who's gone through graduate school and has had a certain career path doing specific internships, and every time they hire that type of person it hasn't worked out for them. So use those past experiences to tailor your approach and identify the type of person not only that you want in the role, but the type of person that might not be a good fit for the role. So how do we use personas? How do we use them to hire for success within our organization? The persona is going to be one step in a multi-step process of finding the right person for your team. This is used to help with the hiring process, but we want to have total alignment between what's actually being performed in the role, the job posting, where we post the job, performance management mechanisms, and the employee persona based on the type of individual who's going to be best fit for this. The value of personas is that they give you the opportunity to have a really targeted search. So this is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make in the hiring process. Process. They post their jobs to job boards or to places where maybe the person that they're looking for isn't going. So for example, if you're looking for a software engineer, and software engineers traditionally don't hang out on LinkedIn all day unless they're actively looking for a job, then maybe you don't want to post it on LinkedIn. You might be looking for passive candidates, and you need to go to the groups or to the areas where you might be able to find that passive candidate. You wouldn't go fishing in the woods, and you want to make sure you're going fishing where the fish are. It also helps you to create a repeatable process. So after identifying who you are looking for and where to look, you can establish a repeatable process that you can be constantly using to develop bench strength. You should always be asking people within your network if they know anybody who fits this employee persona. The more accurate picture you can paint of the type of person you're looking for, the more likely you are to get quality referrals from those in your network. And when we know what we are looking for, we can ask better questions to determine if the person fits the mold. We will talk more about the types of questions to ask in another session, but asking questions that don't identify the traits and characteristics that you are looking for to excel in the role can be a total waste of time during the interview process. So creating personas— how do we create our employee personas? Personas. We're trying to find the perfect fit for our organization. We must first understand what's most important to us. If attitude is the most important thing and we can train for skill, then we need to make sure we're trying to identify where to find the person with the right attitude. So the first step we want to take— and once again, you can find this on our website, you can download this template so you can complete the exercise on your own. Section 1 is who. So for this persona, we're looking at a customer service rep and we're asking ourselves, what type of background does this person have? What experiences do they have? Are we looking for somebody who has worked in the financial world or somebody who has experience with direct customer experience in the past, or customer service experience in the past? Are we looking for somebody who's had a certain level of— or at a certain stage in their career path where they're on a trajectory that's going to suit where we are with the role. Maybe this is a middle-level role and you're looking for somebody who's got those 3 to 5 years under them. Are there particular industries that you've hired from in the past that you've had great success with? For example, when we hire sales reps from the staffing industry, they tend to do really well because they have high levels of outbound call volume in that industry. So identifying industries that— and experience levels that create success on this person is going to help you to start to build this— paint this picture of what this person looks like. Next, you want to understand what are their characteristics? How do they act? What are their mannerisms? What type of personality does well in this role? So if you're hiring for an analyst-level position, there are certain personalities that do really well with analyzing data and understanding trends and performing those types of tasks within your organization, whereas somebody who doesn't fit that personality type might not necessarily thrive in that role. Do they have interests? Are there groups where you can go find these individuals? So for example, if you are hiring somebody who's a software developer, we go back to that, are there certain development groups? Are you looking for somebody that writes in a specific type of code that you can go and find them in a local meetup. And where do you find these people is really important because it's going to help to streamline your recruiting process, not only now but in the future. Next, you really want to understand the what about this person. What are their goals? Do they have primary goals? Are they goal-oriented individuals? Where do they see themselves in their career 3, 5 years down the road? Are you able to offer those things? Are there things that are important to them like working from home or certain benefit packages or career advancement? You need to understand and have a clear picture in your mind of what's going to be important to this person, what type of goals they have. And if you don't know, then go and find somebody who fits your mold of the ideal employee and interview them and ask them what's important. And ask them what's important to the other people that they work around that are really good at it. So we work with a lot of small businesses, and oftentimes we'll go do research at larger companies to ask them where they have packs of individuals that work in these particular roles to say, "Hey, what's important to you? What makes you thrive? What makes you care about this job and stay?" And that dovetails nicely into the next piece. What are their motivations? Do they have specific influencers in their lives? Are there seminars or educational things that they care about? What, what stage of their life are they in? Is family their number one priority? Are they earlier in their career where they want to have spending money and flexible time available to them? You need to understand what it is that this individual cares about so that you can tailor your approach and meet them where they are. And finally, we ask the why behind this individual. Are there communities Are there networks where you can find them? I'll give a great example of a client we were working with where we were looking for somebody entry-level. We determined the exact path that they might have worked through at the local university and determined, you know, what major they would have had, what type of groups they would have been a part of, even could visualize 2 or 3 people that had hired in the past that fit this mold. And so where are we going to go and find this person? Well, let's go to the department head of the university for the finance department, which is where they were looking for these individuals, and then find out what groups, what networks, what— interview them for half an hour, and that saves us hours and hours and hours of just blindly posting ads on Indeed.com and hoping for the— that the best person is going to find us. We can go where they are and try to find them. And then finally, as we mentioned earlier, does our offering align with what is important important to this person? Are we offering the right benefits? Are we offering a career path, growth? Have we highlighted the why of our organization throughout the employment process? So does somebody understand that they're going to make an impact when they start with our organization? For example, here at ERG, our why is very simple. We want to serve the community. We donate 3% of all revenue to local nonprofits.. And we volunteer together as a team regularly. And so our employees get to see the impact that they make in the community. And it becomes part of our employee persona, part of our interview process. We want people who already care about the community before they come in the door. We don't want to try to— try to get somebody to commit to service. We want somebody that's already a way of their life. So what is important to them and does it align with our organization? Organizational goals. So now that you've created an employee persona, I have a pretty good feeling that you'll be able to visualize the types of individuals, their background, where they come from, what experience they have, where they hang out. Now we can tailor our approach, our job description— excuse me, our job posting— can hit the highlights as far as what's going to be important to this individual. We can put that posting in the places where this person is and start fishing somewhere where we might actually catch some fish. And we can also find ourselves in a situation to hire the right person. And that brings us to the key points to remember. First of all, like I mentioned earlier, do not discriminate. Make sure you hire the right person for the role and that when you're looking at this employee persona, it can't isolate everybody from from the conversation, right? It can't be one type of person over another in the respect that it's going to completely discriminate large groups of folks unless that's based on professional experience. Second of all, go where they are. Find your ideal fit. Don't wait for them to come to you. You should always be recruiting. Top talent is at a premium and you need A-players. A-players produce— the top 30% of employees produce at a 200% higher clip than than the bottom 70%. So let me say that again. The top 30% of engaged employees recruit— excuse me— produce at a 200% higher clip than the bottom 70%. So finding the ideal fit is much more important and allows you to be committed and hire slow because you don't want that 200% variance in productivity. There are ways you can plug the gap. You can hire a temporary individual. Try and allocate work amongst other team members. Take the time to hire slow. And ultimately, I always like to end with great quotes from Mr. Goodnight or somebody like him, but if you treat employees like they make a difference, they will. Make sure that you're doing well by your team and you're hiring the right type of people that share common values that your organization has, and you will see a magnificent difference in your productivity over time. I'm grateful that you took a few minutes out of your day to share this HR update with us. If you have any questions, you can find me at the number on the screen, or you can reach me at matt@ergpayroll.com. Once again, ERG provides small business payroll and human resources solutions. We can become the HR department for your organization. We can do trainings like this specific to you and your team and actually walk walk through how to get to these employee personas with you by each role and coach you throughout the process, amongst many other things. So if you're looking for a service provider as it relates to payroll and human resources, you can find us at ergpayroll.com. We're excited to hear from you. Thanks so much and have an awesome day.