I’ve noticed that there is an increasing amount of discussion about the use of personas as a tool for sourcing and recruitment marketing. However I also suspect that is still not a great deal of understanding about what personas actually are and just how useful they can be.
I can think of no better person to shed some light on this top than John Vlastelica from Recruiting Toolbox. John returns for a second visit to the show after his incredibly popular interview last year on hiring managers
In this interview we discuss:
What are personas, how can they be used and what are their advantages
The key components of a persona and how you go about creating them
How personas can be used to build pipelines in a way that massively accelerate time to hire
Using personas to help shape the recruiting sell by defining magnet people and magnet projects
John also give his thoughts on the future role of technology in this area and explains why he wants to see more employers using these persona based methodologies.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 83 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’ve noticed an increasing amount of discussion about the use of Personas as a tool for sourcing and recruitment marketing, but perhaps not a great deal of understanding about what they actually are and why they’re useful. I can think of no better person to shed some light on this topic than my guest this week, John Vlastelica from Recruiting Toolbox. John returns to the show for the second time after his incredibly popular interview last year on hiring managers. I know many of you will be very glad to hear from him again.
Matt Alder [00:01:49]:
Hi John, welcome back to the podcast.
John Vlastelica [00:01:51]:
Thank you, Matt. Glad to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:53]:
Now, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you back. The last time we recorded, you managed to help me create what has been the most popular episode ever of the podcast. So you’re a very popular guest and people actually sent me emails asking me to invite you back. So welcome back.
John Vlastelica [00:02:13]:
Wow, I’m flattered. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:02:15]:
So for those people who may not have heard you on the podcast last time, could you just quickly introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
John Vlastelica [00:02:25]:
Sure. My name is John Vlastelica. I’m based in Seattle in the United States and I lead a consulting and training firm called Recruiting Toolbox and we work with companies to help them improve their recruiting processes and do a lot of training for hiring managers, interviewers, a lot of training for recruiters and recruiting managers. Very, very much bring that kind of former practitioner. I was a recruiting director at Expedia and Amazon. My team all comes from the corporate world so we bring that kind of practitioner, real world, non high level MBA speak kind of approach to our work. I think our clients really like that we work with companies all over the world, from the biggest companies down to little startups. I’ve been doing it about 10 years and love my job. Feel very fortunate to get to do what I love.
Matt Alder [00:03:09]:
Fantastic. Now, the last time you were on the show, we were talking about building effective relationships with hiring managers. The topic that we’ve picked today is Personas. Tell us about Personas. They’re something that I’m sure lots of people have heard referred to at conferences, but maybe people don’t exactly know what they are and what they’re for. So could you just talk us through it?
John Vlastelica [00:03:38]:
Sure, yeah. I was introduced to Personas through a marketing leader at a company I worked at a little over 10 years ago. And it’s a concept that I think we’re all familiar with. We may not know the term Personas, but it’s the idea that marketers in the 90s started looking at their customers and really dove deep into this idea of customer segmentation and started to develop these marketing Personas, these fictional characters, these groupings of people that had a similar narrative, similar behavior. The classic example I use in the United States, if I ask you, if we say, talk to me about what a mom is or what a mom does, we’ll get all kinds of stuff. But if I say soccer mom in the United States, and I’ve done this many times where I’ve introduced this concept in training, if I say soccer mom in the US And I ask, what kind of car does a soccer mom socker mom drive? Where does she shop? What kind of things are in her car? What kind of things stress her out? What does she drink? People will say, minivan, target laundry, juice boxes, Starbucks. They can picture. You can visualize a soccer mom’s life when you’re a marketer, Obviously, the more you understand, the better you understand the Persona, the kind of buyer you’re interested in, the more likely you are to be able to speak to their motivators and get them engaged in some kind of behavior you’re looking for. Typically, to buy something thing. In the recruiting world, there’s a concept we throw around called profiles. Like, we get a target candidate profile, and that’s important. It’s usually done at the rec level, so it’s usually for a specific opening for a hiring manager. I can share a little more as we talk, Matt. But one of the things I started to think about is how could I leverage this Personas concept when I was faced as a corporate recruiting leader with a whole bunch of hires to make across a category that sounded like moms, where I knew there were different flavors of moms in there, but it sounded like we have to hire a whole bunch of moms. The exact examp was actually software engineers. For me, I realized I had some big problems to tackle. The most simple one was we had 400 plus of these positions to fill, and I couldn’t afford to have recruiters go have 400 individual conversations with different hiring managers to understand their unique needs. There was tremendous overlap, and you could probably bucket those 400 into different categories. That’s where I was introduced to the idea of Personas, and it had a huge impact on how we think about sourcing and pipelining. That’s a little bit of what I wanted to talk to you about today, was put it in the context really of recruiting. Of course, not in. Not in marketing.
Matt Alder [00:06:07]:
Yeah. And I think that’s the interesting thing because, you know, I’m sure from. From your example, you know, even in the countries where people aren’t familiar with a soccer mom, the, you know, the concept of sort of stereotype typing people by, you know, the products that they buy and their consumer profile will be familiar. I suppose what would be less familiar is, you know, what are the components of that from a recruiting perspect? How do you go about building those for recruiting, and what value is there in using them?
John Vlastelica [00:06:45]:
Yeah, let’s start with the value first, because I think that will put it in better context. One of the things that I struggle with when trying to build pipelines is, and we work with a lot of companies that talk about pipelining. I don’t know who told hiring managers about pipelines, but we do focus group conversations with hiring managers every year. We talk to thousands of hiring managers all over the world. What’s interesting is they all want pipelines. They don’t know exactly what that means. And frankly, when we talk to recruiting teams, it’s confused. There’s talent communities, there’s pipelining for a specific wreck. There’s the pipeline that exists today for a specific wreck, a funnel that’s being built, and then there’s pipelining, where you’re building your sourcing around particular profiles, if you will. One of the big benefits of doing Persona work and building out Personas, whether you’re talking about doing that for nurses, where you have different types of nurses, Certainly a pediatric nurse working in a hospital is very different from the kind of nurses that my wife works with in her profession, where she’s in an urgent care center, which is different than someone that’s doing a cancer ward or working in the emergency room. There’s different flavors of nurses with different profiles, if you will. And getting really clear on that has a huge impact on your ability to build Pipelines and being really clear about the motivators of those people, less so about the demographic background, but more about the motivators of those people will allow you, when you’re doing passive candidate sourcing and you’re trying to build pipelines, to kind of categorize these people based on their interests. And a lot of times in recruiting, we think about candidates in terms of whether or not they’re a profile match, whether they meet our requirements. And Persona development. A lot of it is really thinking like the person thinking what that person is looking for. It’s really got more of a what are the motivators, what are the behaviors, what is the kind of career narrative for this person? And how do we make sure when we’re building pipelines and we’re doing outreach that we’re really capturing them, capturing their interests and putting them into a pipeline, if you will, or pipelining them in a way that really matches what their interests are with what our company has to offer. A lot of the benefits that I see in Personas, some of it is pipelining, but a lot of it is just getting clear on things like what makes a good front end software engineer for our company, or what makes a good pediatric nurse for our company or a good inside salesperson for our company. And getting people in your organization aligned on that. Not kind of doing the hiring manager specific preferences, but getting people that are consumers of that Persona in your company aligned on that means that when you start a search or when you do pipelining work, you know, you’re already 80% of the way there towards delivering on what good looks like. In other words, a lot of us do these strategy meetings with hiring managers as one offs. What if you took that up a level and you did that with a group of hiring managers who are looking for pediatric nurses or front end software engineers. If you did it that way, you’re starting to build out more kind of Persona level work. Does that make sense?
Matt Alder [00:09:48]:
Yeah, that makes, that makes perfect sense. I think what would be useful is to understand a little bit more about what the components of a Persona might be. Because I think that, you know, people might be thinking this is years of experience and specific skills. But it’s more than that, isn’t Is?
John Vlastelica [00:10:07]:
Yeah. When I think about the big buckets of Persona components, the work that I did, getting top performers in these kinds of roles together to understand them better, to think like them versus just think about them, it is certainly understanding things like who they are, what they’re working on, what drives them. How is a Pediatric nurse different than other types of nurses. How is a back end and front end engineer different? They might both have computer science degrees, they might both have bachelor’s and nursing degrees, but their interests and their motivation and their kind of career narrative look different. It’s also understanding what companies they come from and this is the part that’s missing and why a lot of us in those strategy kickoff, I hate to call it intake, but strategy meetings with hiring managers. We get a list of target companies, but really understanding why they’re working in those companies, which means really understanding the work they do and their interests, then building out as part of a component, in addition to who they are and where they live and where they work, is the sell. Understanding why we’d be an attractive employer that gets into things like articulating for this particular Persona, what are the magnet people and magnet projects? By magnet people, I mean who are people that are doing that kind of work that particular Persona is interested in that might attract them? And what is the specific project work they could do that might attract them? Beyond that, when you build Personas, you spend time understanding not just how to sell the people, but how to screen. How do I know I’m talking to a front end engineer versus a back end engineer? What are typical interviewing questions I can use as a recruiter? What does a typical interviewing team look like and what should a it look like? Who would that Persona expect to meet with if they came and interviewed here? Understanding candidate experience, best practices. There might be certain things you do for that Persona that are different than other Personas because of their interests. Then one that’s not talked about very often when you do pipelining work is just kind of the rules of engagement. In the Persona world. You often have multiple hiring managers that are interested in hiring the same kind of talent like campus or university recruiting. You have to build out a way of talking about how do we allocate people that come out of these these Personas. When we have 10 front end software engineers coming in and there are multiple hiring managers, how do we decide? Do we combine an interview as the company or do we let individual hiring managers interview separately? And do we give candidates choice in where they get to work in the company, or do we have some kind of allocation model where we guide them to certain groups based on business priority? These are the kind of things that are sort of covered in a target candidate profile, but you’re doing it at not the rec level. You’re doing it a step up from that by getting alignment on that with groups of Hiring managers or groups of business leaders. It allows you to really accelerate that time to hire piece, that time to alignment and time to hire piece because you’ve already got general buy in on what makes this Persona a good fit for your company and you understand the Persona really, really differently. Does that make sense as well?
Matt Alder [00:13:10]:
Yeah, it does. And I suppose that you’re effectively designing a candidate experience and a recruitment round that specific Persona. So I can see that there are a number of recruiting benefits to that. What are the other specific recruiting benefits for working in this way?
John Vlastelica [00:13:31]:
There’s a lot. I’ll tell you one of the things that is so important and is really hard right now. A lot of organizations have sourcers, people that are dedicated to just candidate outreach work. A lot of times the sourcers are centralized, not necessarily aligned to individual hiring teams or a recruiter or a hiring manager. Their credibility on the phone is paramount to getting a player talent. They have to be able to speak intelligently about the work. A lot of times sourcers that are disconnected from that hiring manager or rec level discussion that happens in the beginning, they struggle to sound credible when you do Persona work. And this is one of the things I was trying to solve for 10 years ago when I first started doing this work was how do I get my recruiters to sound smarter and more effective on the phone? How do I teach them? Or how do we as an organization teach our sourcing team how we can go into conversations with candidates and sound credible about the work, speak directly to their motivators, Uncover that I’m talking to a front end versus back end engineer. Sometimes engineers don’t categorize them the way we categorize them. Once I uncover what their Persona is, making sure that I’m able then to speak intelligently about the kinds of opportunities that exist at my company. There’s also big improvements that come from things like working on your career site. A lot of us have generic career sites. We have culture, vision, mission, company info. But wouldn’t it be amazing if when someone came to your career site, if they identified as not just a nurse, but a particular kind of nurse. If you could create opportunities to showcase the work and the connections they can have in your company and culture specific to that Persona. Interview guides better workforce planning where you’re building things out by Persona type versus just generic placeholders like nurse, sales engineer. There’s so many benefits to doing the work on this. It’s work that we already do, but we let the hiring manager specific preferences drive our focus. If we just take it up a level and focus more on this Persona idea. It’s a spend a little more time upfront and you get all these benefits downstream. Because now when I go to have a conversation with with a hiring manager about a specific wreck, if I know it’s generally connected to this Persona, I’m 80% of the way through that conversation already. We already have alignment as a group of hiring managers and business leaders on what good looks like. And now I’m just tweaking it for the final 20%. So tons of benefits to doing this and doing it well.
Matt Alder [00:16:05]:
I suppose one of the other ones is thinking back to when I used to do media planning, which is quite a long time ago now we try and do things like this to, you know, to profile the talent that we were looking to market to. And this was kind of over 10 years ago. And it was tricky because you were working off a fairly limited amount of demographic information when you were doing advertising targeting. Obviously that’s all changed. And with social and with LinkedIn and with the sheer amount of data that’s available on people now, you know, I’m guessing that this translates well into a marketing requirement. Recruitment, marketing strategy as well in a huge way.
John Vlastelica [00:16:52]:
Yeah. Like you we did work or we had people at ad agencies doing what were called media habits surveys where they were looking at the media habits. What kind of information do people consume. And we generally did that kind of at the engineers do this and sales does that and finance people read this or go to this website. And I think this is. You’re right. Taking it another level deeper and really understanding that better. That is one of the core questions you ask and uncover in your Persona development work is to understand what these people read and where they go to get information. It absolutely informs where you would place your bets on the marketing side, not just on the sales side. One of the things that’s interesting about Personas in the real world, a lot of organizations, as I said earlier, are trying to build pipelines. Understanding how to feed those pipelines with marketing insights is critical for sure. I want to paint a picture for you a little bit of what it looks like when these are up and running and what the potential looks like if you’re doing volume sourcing around difficult to find people. We had built a system that was internally built internally and it was really built around the idea of pipeline. A lot of organizations have CRMs and or applicant tracking systems. ATS of course, are built around RECs and resumes. CRMs are usually built around leads and other things way before people talked about CRMs and recruiting. We had built out a system that allowed the sourcing teams to put candidates into different pipelines based on Personas. And the idea was that these candidates, which had recruiter screening notes and usually a resume or profile, were put into a place that multiple hiring managers from around the company would kind of fish out of these pools. So they would go in and they would tag people that were interesting. One of the things that we were trying to solve for that, I think is an interesting application of this is we were having to hire a whole bunch of people in a short amount of time, breaking these 400 positions. About 85% of them fit into about five different Personas. So 350 plus we could actually break into these five different Personas. We built a pipeline around each Persona. We had alignment with the hiring managers that were interested in buying that Persona, that were consumers of that Persona. We had alignment on what it looks like. We were able to feed our candidates into these Persona pools. What we found is that, that hiring managers were not having to weed through nearly as much kind of, hey, what do you think of this resume? Is this someone we want to bring on board? Hiring managers who had immediate needs, urgent needs before they even opened a rec, were able to go in and start to understand the kind of talent flow we had based on these different profiles. Which means as a recruiting leader, I was able to set some expectations that were different around how quickly we could ramp up a new team. We were always recruiting against these profiles, these Personas, because we always had an appetite for these Personas. And it really shifted the mentality. In addition to just shifting operationally how managers were getting access to resumes, which used to be through emails and in person resume reviews, we were now able to shift the mentality to we’re always recruiting for these kinds of Personas. And that managers needed to always be recruiting and always be interviewing that we had a whole bunch of hiring to do. It was a really interesting shift in the way we thought about recruiting. And a lot of organizations that are trying to do pipelining, I think skip this step and get a little too hyper focused on the sourcing aspects. And don’t necessarily build the structure, the framework of Personas, which would be just a gigantic accelerator if you’re trying to do big, large scale pipelining work.
Matt Alder [00:20:38]:
I suppose that leads on to the next question really well, which is, if I wanted to go and if someone listening wanted to go and do this, how do you go about building these Personas? What kind of process do you have to follow.
John Vlastelica [00:20:55]:
I’m sure there are consulting firms like ours that could help you with this. I’ll tell you, it’s really something you can do internally and probably should do internally. The key is to work with your business leaders and your recruiters to identify the big buckets, what are the likely Persona categories or Personas that we’re going to hire, and whatever job category that might be. Let’s use recruiters as an example. If I were going to hire 100 recruiters next year and I just go hire 100 recruiters, you and I both know Matt, and everyone listening know not all recruiters are the same. There’s sourcers, there’s campus recruiters, there’s executive recruiters, there’s full cycle recruiters, there’s agency recruiters that have sales quotas. There’s different flavors of recruiters. Once you identify the big buckets and the mix you think you’re going to need, you want to go get high performers in each one of those categories together to understand them better. And you’re going to spend time understanding all those things I mentioned earlier, kind of who they are, what kind of places they work, what their interests, what kind of work is most appealing to them, how we would sell them, how we map our work and our projects to their interests, how we’d screen and interview, and even kind of the allocation model or rules of engagement. So you’d want to get those people in a room together so you can start to understand these Personas. You want the same person who is doing the Persona work for, let’s say the campus recruiter to do the executive recruiter one as well. Because you want to understand the differences, the magic in Personas. It’s not just saying all great recruiters are great salespeople. Some recruiters, like researchers, may not be phenomenal at the sales part. So you want to hear how the research recruiter is different than the executive recruiter, which is different than the source or the campus recruiter. What you want to do then is take a look at each one of those Personas. Once you get feedback on that and begin to now bring people from multiple Personas into a room and hear the differences, ask questions to understand. Boy, when we talk about the scale of what we’re working on and we talk about the kind of work we’re working on, what of that speaks really well to the executive recruiter? That doesn’t speak as much to the campus recruiter. So campus and recruiter and executive recruiter as an example. Campus might be much more Interested in the project management piece and much more interested in social media and millennial work and whatever. And the executive recruiter might be much more interested in making an impact with the executive team and the visibility with executives that comes from that work. They might need to be a much stronger assessor of talent because they’re playing a much bigger role in courting candidates over a longer period of time. Where a campus recruiter needs to be much more event and project management oriented, maybe. So as you talk about the work now, you’ve got people, representatives from different Personas, and you’re starting to really see the differences and hear the differences. And then there’s some validation work you do afterwards where once you finish the work of kind of comparing the Personas to each other, you go back to the groups and you begin to label the Persona, define it really well. You write something up that goes through a period of validation work with different high performers on the team, business leaders on the team. That’s the really hard work is getting buy in and driving alignment on what good looks like for this Persona. But because you’re not at the rec level, it’s a lot easier than trying to get five hiring managers generally to agree on what they’re looking for in their specific recs. You’re keeping this kind of at the 10,000 foot level, not at the C level. Getting alignment, getting agreement is actually a little easier than if you were to try and get five people who are all interviewing the same candidate to agree on what good looks like for that candidate. Does that make sense? So it’s a bit of a process with a lot of focus groups and a lot of conversation and facilitation.
Matt Alder [00:24:29]:
Yeah, it does make sense. I think it’s, you know, it can be quite a complex process to describe, but I think that as people think about it and move through it, it’s a very logical. It’s a very logical thing. So who does this? Well, are there particular companies or particular industries even where you see this technique being used, being used effectively?
John Vlastelica [00:24:56]:
You know, I don’t think there’s been as much work in the Persona space as I would like to see. And I don’t really care if you call it Personas or profiles or the labeling doesn’t matter as much. As I said earlier, I actually don’t see many organizations focused on this. I see this gap between, oh my gosh, we have all these hires to make. Managers want these profiles built with passive candidates right away. And we just kind of jump into the work of what I call the Try harder strategy where we just kind of run and go faster and do our best to try and find more great talent. And we use just things like target companies and job titles a little too much. I know that when I presented on this topic at a couple conferences a few years ago, that Workday said that they were actually putting Personas in place after the session I did. I haven’t followed up with them to see how much success they’ve had. They’ve had some changes in leadership in the last few years, but I know that organizations, when you hear this idea, it’s sort of feels like you’re already doing some of this because we talk about profiles, but it does take extra work. I would love to hear from your listeners if there’s people that are actually finding success with this. I had tremendous success with this. It was a little over 10 years ago now, before people were really talking about Personas. I’ve presented on this at conferences and have people say, this sounds like a really obvious thing I should be doing. And it does take a little extra work. But it does seem when you hear the idea, like, well, obviously if you’re going to build profiling strategies, you need to have Personas as part of that. But I would love to hear from anyone that’s having success with this because I think it’s fantastic. Marketers, of course, are having success with this, and I have a lot of clients that use this as part of their marketing strategy and customer segmentation. I don’t think it’s fully made its way into the recruiting world yet.
Matt Alder [00:26:39]:
I suppose leading on from that, just as a final question, how do you see this panning out in the future? Is this something that technology can help with? How do you see it developing?
John Vlastelica [00:26:53]:
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, you can imagine all kinds of things, especially in the world of assessments. You can imagine that people are building assessments around Personas and there really is work that’s being done in this space already. I know of on the technical side, where you’re building assessments or tests that are built around different flavors of engineers, you have different expectations for different types of engineers. You are seeing a lot of work. On the marketing side, anyone that’s putting a CRM in place, if they’re not thinking about this already, they will be soon thinking about how do we build our CRM tagging in a way that we’re able to tag people by Personas when we want to do outreach or outbound marketing. We’re not blasting everyone that appears to be some kind of software engineer with the same information. We’re segmenting our marketing to those folks. Those are two examples and there’s so many benefits to doing this. Well, another thing that’s not technology related but interview training. If you’re going to do interview training at your company, a lot of us do generic interview training and we teach people about our culture. Wouldn’t it be phenomenal if you could do Persona based interview training and bring in high performers who are in that Persona category to co lead the training, talk about what good looks like for that Persona, really arm the interviewers that are going to be interviewing for pediatric nurses on how to speak to the motivators, how to sell, how to interview, how to select. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we took this information and pushed it? I hate to say push it, but kind of pushed it into all these different areas where we’re a little too generic, a little too general Today I think it would have gigantic impact. Impact. And that’s certainly been my experience.
Matt Alder [00:28:29]:
John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John Vlastelica [00:28:32]:
You’re very welcome. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:28:34]:
My thanks to John Vlastelica. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes, on Stitcher, or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for Recruiting Future. You can find all of the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
