There are numerous recruiting tools and strategies that can be utilized to discover top talent. One of the somewhat underused tools is candidate personas. Similar to buyer personas, candidate personas serve as a blueprint for your ideal candidate, encompassing the skills, experiences, and attributes you desire them to possess.

Once created, you can tailor job promotions toward this persona and evaluate candidates who apply based on how closely they align with your employee persona. Although candidate personas may sound like an excellent tool, it's essential to be aware of some drawbacks before integrating them into your recruitment strategy.

Unsure if candidate personas will boost your hiring strategy? This article will explore the key advantages and disadvantages of candidate personas and provide guidance on incorporating them into your hiring process if you decide they’re right for your recruiting needs.

What Is a Candidate Persona?

Candidate personas are representations of ideal job candidates for roles you’re hiring for. They are somewhat like buyer personas used by marketing teams to outline and understand their target customers. These recruitment tools can help highlight exactly what the hiring team needs to be looking for and what platforms to use to target these kinds of candidates. Candidate personas are created based on a combination of company data and needs and job market research.

While personas can be highly useful to many types of organizations, there are advantages and disadvantages to keep in mind and weigh up before deciding if you will craft candidate personas as part of your hiring process.

A man and a woman having a business meeting — Candidate persona’s represent your ideal candidate and can help you find the right hire for an open role.

The Pros of Candidate Personas

1. Targeted Recruitment

One of the main pros of candidate personas is that they allow recruiters to better target ideal candidates. By understanding the specific skills, experience, and personality traits needed for the role, recruiters can craft job posts and recruitment marketing campaigns that reach talent that aligns with the needs of the open role as well as the company’s values.

2. Streamlined Hiring Process

By defining the ideal candidate in advance in terms of experience, skills, and personality, you can streamline and speed up the hiring process. Candidate personas allow you to put resources where they’re most effective, saving time and often money. Just a few ways personas help streamline the process include by allowing you to set specific criteria for screening resumes and aiding in the creation of interview questions and other assessments.

3. Enhanced Employer Branding

Employer branding is highly important if you’re looking to become an employer of choice. By creating an outline of the type of candidates you want to attract, you can craft hiring and employer branding promotions that appeal to them. If your promotions are appealing to these potential candidates, they will become interested in working for you and will be more likely to apply for positions at your organization when available.

4. Better Alignment With Organizational Goals

Another pro of creating candidate personas is that they offer an excellent way to align your hiring efforts with organizational goals. When crafting the personas, think about company short-term and long-term goals and what a candidate will need (in terms of skills, behaviors, and values) to align with those goals.

Two women sitting at a desk with a laptop — Candidate personas can streamline the hiring process, making it quicker to find the perfect candidate.

5. Improved Job Descriptions

Crafting job descriptions based on candidate personas allows for clearer and more appealing communication with potential candidates. Job postings that are crafted with your ideal candidate in mind are more likely to attract individuals who are a perfect fit for the role and discourage those who may not be suitable.

6. Enhanced Candidate Experience

Interestingly, the use of candidate personas can result in an improved candidate experience throughout the hiring process. Understanding what your ideal candidate looks like allows you to tailor the recruiting process to their needs and expectations.

Top candidates will have an enhanced experience when the process is carefully matched to them. This, in turn, will foster a positive perception of your organization even among those who are ultimately not offered the role.

7. Reduced Turnover

As you can see, candidate personas help to align the hiring process with the candidate and organization’s needs and goals. The better the fit of the candidate with the company, the more likely they will be satisfied and motivated in the role and unlikely to leave the position. This will then contribute to reduced turnover rates, especially when a candidate persona-centered recruiting strategy is rolled out for all positions being hired for.

As candidate personas can help find the best fit for your company, they may also help in reducing turnover.

The Cons of Candidate Personas

1. Generalization and Stereotyping

A primary con of candidate personas is the chance for generalization which can lead to stereotyping. Attempting to categorize unique individuals into a few personas might overlook individual strengths, skills, and experiences.

When you create one candidate persona that you center your efforts around, you can eliminate excellent candidates because they don’t meet some elements of your persona. As a result, you could end up with a selection of uniform candidates with identical traits who actually may not be the best fit.

2. Overlooking Diversity

Leading on from the last disadvantage of candidate personas, their stereotyping potential can result in diversity loss. When you focus on your ideal candidate, you can overlook diversity and reject candidates who don’t fit a predefined mold but can bring a unique perspective to the team. This can include overlooking work experience diversity and overlooking personal diversity, such as certain genders or minority groups.

3. Limited Flexibility

Putting a lot of focus on candidate personas can limit flexibility within the hiring process. This issue can ultimately make it more challenging to find the right fit and may extend the amount of time and other resources needed to fill the role.

It can also mean that you don’t properly adapt to changing circumstances and could pass on a top candidate that doesn’t quite fit the persona because you feel you don’t have the flexibility to deviate from the candidate persona that has been created.

4. Data Accuracy Challenges

Data should be incorporated when creating candidate personas. However, the data you use may not always be reliable. If it is flawed or outdated, you may create inaccurate candidate personas that lead to misguided recruitment strategies and bad hires.

5. Resource Intensive

One of the other important cons of candidate personas to consider is that creating them and incorporating them into your hiring strategy can be quite resource-intensive. It takes time and resources to collect the data needed to craft your personas that will help you find the ideal candidate.

For many businesses, especially smaller companies, the resources and return connected with the use of these personas will likely make candidate personas not worth it. If you’re a larger organization, with a dedicated hiring team and will be hiring for the same or similar roles frequently, you’ll have the resources available and the creation of candidate personas will be much more justified and beneficial.

Three woman looking a computer screen making candidate personas — Creating candidate personas can add a lot of time to the hiring process and can lead to generalizations.

6. Potential for Bias

The stereotyping potential and limited flexibility of candidate personas can lead to bias in the hiring process. During the creation of candidate personas, unconscious bias can inadvertently lead to bias in the personas and the recruiting processes that use them.

If you’re interested in candidate personas but also want to actively reduce bias in the hiring process, put thought into creating candidate personas that are inclusive. Ideally, have multiple people provide input into the creation of the candidate personas and run them past as many team members as possible before using them in your recruiting.

Also, don’t be too rigid with them. Use the personas as a guide, but be flexible and willing to consider candidates that fall outside your “perfect candidate” if they have unique experience to bring to the team.

7. Inconsistent Application

If multiple team members use the candidate personas for recruiting purposes, each individual may interpret and apply them inconsistently. This can lead to varied assessments of candidates based on the same persona. The lack of consistency can also affect the fairness and effectiveness of the hiring process.

8. Neglecting Individual Growth Potential

Candidate personas often focus heavily on the current skills and experiences that candidates are expected to have. However, this approach eliminates those with a slightly lower level of current skills but high growth potential.

If you focus only on what employees have done and the current skills they possess via candidate personas, you will ignore candidates with the ability to adapt and acquire new skills quickly that may be an excellent addition to your team.

Candidate personas also often highlight hard skills vs. soft skills. This means that you could miss out on people with great soft skills (which can actually be more difficult to obtain) because they lack a few hard skills, which they can probably learn easily on the job.

9. Potential for a Stagnant Hiring Approach

Relying heavily on candidate personas could lead to stagnation with your hiring approach. Job markets are highly dynamic, and the skills and experiences required for a role can change rapidly. Therefore, your candidate personas may become outdated quickly.

If you don’t update them frequently, you’ll end up with a recruitment strategy that isn’t designed to reach the best talent in the current market. You will likely also overlook candidates who possess emerging skills when using candidate personas that are based on exactly what’s needed in the current job landscape.

Three people in a business meeting — Ensure multiple team members review the candidate personas to minimize the chance for bias.

How Do You Create Candidate Personas?

If you think candidate personas could be useful to your recruiting process, you may now be wondering how to create candidate personas. When crafting candidate personas, you need to look at data related to the role and those at the company in similar roles that are successful. The following are some steps to keep in mind when outlining your candidate personas.

1. Define Job Roles

Clearly define the role you are hiring for, outlining key responsibilities and the skills and qualifications needed for the role. This will be the foundation for your candidate persona.

2. Collect Data

You will also need to gather data relating to the role, including information about what skills and attributes the candidate will need to be successful in the role and the organization. This can be collected from existing employees, hiring managers, and other company stakeholders. Also, look at data and trends related to the role you're hiring for. For example, is there an emerging skill related to the role that will be beneficial for the candidate to have?

3. Analyze Existing Talent

Along with talking to employees in similar roles about what the new employee will need to be successful, analyze the most successful employees. For example, look at what skills, background, and attributes they had coming into the role and what skills they had to learn within the position to be successful (you may prioritize someone who already possesses those skills to limit on-the-job training). If there are patterns among successful employees, like they all have one type of skill or experience, prioritize these things with your candidate persona.

4. Create Candidate Persona Profiles

With the information collected, craft your candidate persona profiles. Split each persona into segments like:

Skills, qualifications, and experiences.
Career motivations.
Personal attributes and soft skills, like strong organizational skills or the ability to learn quickly.
Preferred communication channels. For example, is targeting this candidate via social media recruiting a good idea? Or could posting on niche job boards bring success?

Don’t forget to keep diversity and inclusion in mind as well. Ensure that you have created candidate personas that are not biased and can apply to a diverse pool of candidates. Getting feedback on the personas before finalizing is a great way to ensure unconscious bias has not been incorporated into your candidate personas.

5. Integrate Candidate Personas Into Your Recruiting Process

Having created candidate personas, get them approved by all stakeholders, including hiring teams and employees who will be working with the new team member. Update with any feedback from those stakeholders and then incorporate the personas into your hiring process. Share them with everyone who will need to use them and shape your recruitment strategy for each open role around the related candidate persona.

Remember to also regularly update the personas based on new organizational needs and goals and job market changes. This ensures that your candidate personas remain relevant and effective in attracting top talent that meets your hiring needs.

In Conclusion

Creating candidate personas takes some time and resources. However, once created, they can be a valuable tool in discovering top candidates who possess the skills the role needs, align with organizational goals, and mesh well with the company culture.

If you’ve been considering adding candidate personas to your recruiting toolkit, the advantages and disadvantages covered in this article should have helped you determine if they’re worth pursuing. As long as you involve multiple team members in the creation of candidate personas and reevaluate them frequently, they could be the element your recruiting needs to take it to the next level.

For even more recruitment advice, connect with the team at Lynne Palmer. Our extensive experience can help your organization streamline its recruitment process to more easily discover top talent.

Understanding Candidate Personas: Exploring the Advantages and Disadvantages