There are many types of users visiting your website on a daily basis—investors, current consumers, potential customers, and also employee candidates. For a successful recruitment strategy, it is imperative to treat potential employees like any of your other target audiences. 

For the careers section of your website to be effective, you will need to learn everything you can about your ideal candidate, what drives them and what information they’re looking for. Everything from their motivations to their goals and even their decision-making factors. Identifying all of this information is called building a persona, and using that persona in your strategy will empower you to present the right content, in the right context, to the right people on a consistent basis—and that’s key to effective employee recruitment.

Understanding Your Perfect Job Candidate

 Let’s start with the basics: what is a persona and why are they important? Tim Croteau, emagine’s UX Director, describes personas perfectly as “fictional characters used to represent the various user types expected to come to your site.” Personas represent those user types’ thoughts, behaviors and goals, and are then used to assess the content and functionality you should include on your site. For example, the personas for a hospital website might include patients, families and caregivers, referring physicians, and medical students (i.e., potential future employees). As you can imagine, each of these personas comes to the site with a completely different goal in mind. 

Determining personas for your target audiences helps inform your website’s structure and content. A potential employee will be attracted by different things than a consumer, but both need to be drawn to your website. Knowing what each audience needs to get out of your site is vital to ensuring your site delivers those things through the appropriate, optimal channel.

 There can also be various personas for each target audience. The differences among your potential employee pool may seem subtle, but they make a big difference in how you should approach them. For example, studies show significant differences between Millennial and Gen-Z job seekers. Though they’re relatively close in age, what they’re looking for in a job can differ greatly. Generally, Millennials are more concerned about work-life balance and 67% would prefer to be their own boss, while Gen-Z is more focused on career advancement and working in a job that gives them purpose.

 Personas are key to ensuring a sound recruitment strategy and it all starts with research, research and more research. What age group will most likely apply to this job position? What is important to them in a career, company, etc? But there’s even more you can do to ensure your website engages the right talent. 

 Mapping the Candidate Journey

 Now that you know the personas of your target candidates, the next step is to map out their journey through your website. By mapping the candidate journey, you ensure the relevant functionality and information is laid out optimally in your website for this persona. It helps you structure the flow of your site with the proper content, calls to action, resources, and more. To begin mapping out a journey, you want to answer a few questions: 

  • What drives this persona to seek employment/leave a current employer?
  • Who/What do they turn to for advice about job hunting, benefits, etc?
  • Where do they look when considering new career paths or growing within their current career?
  • Where do they look for job listings?
  • What makes them pick one company over another?

 With the answers to these questions, you can design your website and careers section to integrate with the candidate journey. By making your website content relevant,  accessible and available to your ideal candidates, you increase your company’s visibility and strengthen your recruitment strategy.

 Conclusion

 A little saying we use here at emagine is “Persona is to get into their head, their journey is to walk in their shoes.” Now that you understand what goes into catering your website and careers section for your ideal candidates, stay tuned for the next blog on optimizing your site using SEO, and reinforcing your recruitment strategy through PPC and social media.