Many companies can sing a song about it: staff shortage. The times when applicants were practically lining up are over. Unless you're named Apple, Google, or Facebook, you have to come up with something to find and retain skilled workers in the long term. HR professionals must know exactly who they are looking for, and the ideal starting point for a smart recruiting strategy is forming personas. The persona concept, originally from marketing, is used to depict the typical customer - as a real person with all their needs, preferences, and desires. Like real people, a persona is characterized by specific values, pursues goals, has strengths and weaknesses, and exhibits typical behavior. Defining a persona helps companies to thoroughly understand the potential user of a product. The concept is also suitable for making potential applicants tangible. In other words, personas in recruiting are ideal candidate profiles that exhibit certain characteristics. These candidate target groups help companies step into the shoes of their desired applicants. Only those who understand the expectations, desires, and needs of applicants can find them, engage with them, and convince them.
Guide to conducting the Persona Workshop
In a workshop with twelve participants, it is possible to create three to five personas. It is important that the group does not only consist of HR professionals but is well mixed: employees and managers from the respective departments with varying lengths of service, new hires, bachelor or master students, and - very importantly - individuals from the desired target group. No one knows better what potential candidates want than your employees from the target group. Only through cross-departmental, creative collaboration (co-creation) is it possible to see beyond the HR scope. Different perspectives bring new ideas to light. The group needs enough space to hang four hanging organizers (canvas) on the wall, as well as colored pencils, a stack of magazines, old or current job advertisements, and job profiles.
Step 1: Questions & Answers
Before getting <>, the group defines the areas where there is a shortage of applicants: for example, in IT, crafts, or other professional fields without a degree. The participants gather all the data: from when can the position be filled for how long? How many applications have been received so far, from where? How does the company respond to an application? Email? Call? Or not at all? Very important: What is the response time? How many applicants withdraw or drop out of the process? How are these procedures communicated internally? The list is long.
Step 2: Narrowing down professional fields
The affected professional fields are determined. For example:
- Communication technician with relevant training
- Specialist computer scientist with a degree in computer science
- Engineer for vehicle technology with a degree in mechanical engineering
To develop a persona, a subgroup of four participants is formed. Also important here: the good mix in the teams. Keywords are different areas and lengths of service. For example, the bachelor student works with the production team leader, and the doctoral candidate works with an experienced specialist in mechatronics in a group.
Step 3: Gathering information
The group researches data from job advertisements, profiles of old applicants, information from the internet, or from family, friends, and acquaintances. These sources help to create an accurate picture of the person and to get inspired. For example, one participant researches that some computer scientists enjoy playing "World of Warcraft" in their free time. His idea: Why not enter the game's forum and engage with other players. The doctoral candidate researches that communication technicians are highly interested in hobby and spare parts pages on the internet. There, professionals who repair old radios in their spare time or build drones gather. Here, too, ads or comments would be useful to attract attention.
Step 4: Collecting facts
In the next step, the entire group consolidates the facts. The subgroups document their results in a persona canvas template: starting with name, age, gender, and marital status. It continues with information on qualifications, skills, interests, career perspectives, and desired requirements. Then comes the finishing touch: What does the persona like? What does she avoid? What makes her unique? Finally, the persona gets a face. The group cuts out photos from magazines or draws sketches so that she can be depicted as realistically as possible. (Graphics 1 and 2) ... [button color="red" size="medium" link="https://hrtoday.ch/de/article/falsche-mitarbeiter-oder-falsche-herangehensweise-persona-modell" icon="" target="true"]Read the full article here[/button] Source: www.hrtoday.ch
