What Do Buyer Personas Have to Do with Recruitment Marketing?

I once read that the biggest compliment you can give a teacher is to create something new with what they taught you, and that’s what I did with Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona framework. I learned Revella’s process for talking to buyers to find out about their decision-making process from reading her book and taking her Buyer Persona Masterclass. I synthesized what I learned into the framework that I use to talk to employees and find out what they value.

Essentially, what I took from Revella was a method of interviewing people to get to the information that really matters. Then take their words and analyze them for insights that uncover what they value. It’s the insights that are used to focus marketing messages.

Finding the Information That Really Matters

Let me walk you through the process from a high level to explain how this works in the talent attraction messaging framework that I developed.

Everything starts with the interview. I have standard questions that I use in every interview, but I also have a conversation with new clients to find out what they think their employees value and I create questions to dig into those areas.

Having a direction to go with prepared questions means that I usually find what I’m going after. For example, if the employee has moved from an entry level to a senior level position, I’m going to learn about their career path and how the company supported their growth. If I ask about flexibility, I’m going to learn about that. But there are also surprises because the interview process is an open-ended conversation and I follow the employee’s lead.

Related: Uncovering the Stories Your Employees Want to Tell

Themes That Emerge from Insights Provide Focus for Recruiting Messages

As I do more and more interviews with the employees at a client company, themes emerge from the insights which can be used to focus careers messaging. I work with the client to form these insights into three to five areas that form the foundation for their employer value proposition. This is the buyer persona connection.

The purpose of buyer personas is to home in on the audience that you want to reach and create the right messages that will attract them and lead them down their decision-making journey. In my recruitment marketing framework, we don’t create candidate personas in the traditional sense with demographics, psychographics, etc. We could do this work but for lots of small businesses, they don’t want or need to.

Communicating with Value Takes Small Business Employers to a New Level

Using employer value insights to focus careers messaging is a huge improvement over just promoting jobs and it’s enough because it takes companies where they want to go. They can stand out from their competitors going after the same talent. They can connect with job candidates, current employees and their referral network in a way that was impossible when all they had to promote were job descriptions.

There’s a bonus too. Using employer value in talent attraction messages transforms a recruiting process that was totally reactive and gives it proactive components. That means that you can see immediate impact while building the foundation for a long-term talent attraction strategy.

This strategy isn’t possible when all you have to say is “we’re hiring.” You have to change your message.

The First Step = Change Your Talent Attraction Message

Changing the talent attraction message is what my course – Better Message. Better Talent Pool. – is all about. In my course, I teach my students how to:

1. Interview employees to learn about their experiences.

2. Extract testimonials from what they say.

3. Analyze testimonials for insights.

4. Weave together testimonials and insights to create compelling recruiting messages.

5. Plant messages where job candidates can engage with them.

The products that come out of this process not only feed careers content, but students gain a new lens to view all of their talent attraction messages.

Add Another Service Category to Your Marketing Business

If you’re a marketing consultant, freelancer or agency, there’s a huge opportunity in front of you right now. Small businesses need to turn their traditional recruiting process into an “always on” employer brand strategy. You have most of the skills you need to help. You just need one more tool and that’s a framework to use to change their message.

Schedule a call with me to learn how to become the recruitment marketing expert that your clients and your community needs.