How to create and lead with candidate personas: measuring their impact

Now more than ever, HR and recruitment teams need to think like marketers and measure the bottom line.

A lot of blood, sweat and tears goes into creating an employer brand strategy and the recruitment marketing collateral that follows. 

Candidate personas may only be one weapon in your arsenal. But given the time it takes to create them it stands to reason that you’ll want to know their true impact.

In previous blogs I've covered why you should create personas, what makes up a persona and how to craft them.

Now I'm going to explore the ways you can measure their impact. 

Here’s a list of metrics to measure and gain insight from:

ENGAGEMENT

Analyse the levels of engagement you’re receiving and the sources it’s coming from. This could be offline, website or social. Use this information to harness your most effective channels.

LEVEL OF APPLICATIONS

Have you seen a spike in the number of people applying for your roles? Well-crafted personas should be leading to an increase in applications.

RETENTION

The work you put into your personas will be visible in your very first interaction with candidates. If they’re having positive experiences, they’re likely to be sticking around for longer.

TIME TO HIRE

Having a tailored persona at your disposal will make it easier to hone in on your ideal candidates and reduce the time it takes to get someone through the door.

COST OF HIRE

See time to hire. Targeted candidate personas used effectively will result in cost as well as time efficiencies.

CONVERSION RATE

If you’ve put the work in up front then you’re likely to be sealing the deal and turning potential candidates into applicants - and eventually employees!

CANDIDATE QUALITY

Arguably the ultimate benchmark. There’s no point cramming your database with names and email addresses if they’re not suitable for your company or roles. Your target personas should help you filter the right skills, experience, cultural fit and provide you with a list of engaged candidates.

Essentially, you want to see whether your personas and subsequent campaigns are attracting the right people.

Want more?

Download our guide to find out what makes up a persona and how personas feed into a wider attraction strategy. 

And feel free to drop me a line at william.geldart@bps-world.com if you’d like to chat more about crafting effective candidate personas.