What Candidate Personas have to do with successful recruiting texts

With data-based Candidate Personas, companies optimize their recruiting strategies in order to address desired candidates at the right place, at the right time, and with the right words. Based on extensive market research, interviews and demographic data, the Candidate Persona helps to better understand professionals and to target communication to talent. The Candidate Persona gives recruiters a detailed idea of the needs, interests, motivations and challenges of potential candidates. With this knowledge, they formulate targeted messages in job advertisements, on websites and direct messages to persuade professionals to apply. The following applies here: The more you approach media and language behavior, the easier it will be later to win over suitable candidates. Important: from the choice of words and sentence structure to images, videos and design - to ensure that the approach really suits the target group, align not only individual components, but the entire communication with the candidate persona.

Targeting the needs of skilled workers

A Candidate Persona helps to highlight the content that really convinces professionals. This starts with the presentation of the corporate culture, tasks and everyday working life, right through to benefits. It doesn't matter whether it's a job ad, texts on a company's recruiting site or direct messages to potential candidates. In short, it's all about addressing the individual needs of skilled workers. While for German employees in general a fair salary, a secure job and flexible working hours are the top priorities, the desire for a home office, the type of tasks and the desired working environment can vary depending on the character. This is where the Candidate Persona comes in, representing a specific group of candidates. Based on the information about their character traits, their way of working and the pain points in the persona profile, recruiters can optimize texts to suit the target group and implement them in a gender-neutral way. The free whitepaper for perfect job ads shows how this works in practice. The following tips can be implemented in all recruiting texts:

• Benefits are important, tasks are more important: The study on the Candidate Experience 21/22 shows that when looking at job offers, employees focus first on the job profile, the salary and the way the company works. Additional benefits offered by the employer rank seventh on a scale of one to nine. That's why it's important to focus on tasks, career opportunities, and corporate culture before discussing benefits.
• Write comprehensibly: Do you offer an attractive pension plan? Then talk and write about it - but please do so in a way that everyone understands. Cumbersome wording or even paragraphs have no place either in job advertisements or on the recruiting page.
• Check texts for gender neutrality: Multiply the number of applications by making all texts gender-neutral. Tools like the Gender Bias Decoder from Stepstone or the Gender Decoder from the Technical University of Munich can help.
• Do without empty adjectives: From environmentally conscious corporate strategy to innovative work processes and modern equipment to a creative work environment, recruiting texts are brimming with adjectives that lack meaning. Do it better and give it meaning: By replacing adjectives with concrete examples. In this way, the innovative work equipment becomes MacBook, iPhone, etc., while the creative work environment is concretized in one to three sentences.
• Adapt content to the reading habits of candidates: The time and attention span of potential candidates is short. It follows: Structure all texts with subheadings, highlights and bullet points and keep them short. The faster and easier the texts can be read, the higher the chance that candidates will apply.

Tailor tonality and language to candidates 

In addition to content, tone and language determine whether candidates are attracted to a company. After all, the way you communicate indirectly provides information about the corporate culture - an essential factor when it comes to choosing an employer. Conversely, the tone and language must also match the corporate culture. After all, you want to remain authentic. Whether formal, casual, more technical or creative - how exactly you design your texts depends on the persona on the one hand, and the employer brand on the other. Parlando is a trend that results from working with personas, among other things. This is a style of writing that is based on the language of a specific target, age, and/or professional group - including colloquialisms, abbreviations, and jargon. The goal: to use language to create emotions and thus closeness.

Selecting the right channels 

Every person is unique, and so is the way they prefer to communicate, but also where. While some candidates seek direct contact at job fairs, others are primarily active on LinkedIn or social networks such as Instagram and TikTok. By knowing these channels, recruiters can use media and texts where they really reach the target group. After all, the best texts make little sense in the wrong place.

Revise texts regularly 

People change, and so do personas - and so do strategies in recruiting. Candidate personas can therefore be used not only to create targeted texts, but also to optimize them on an ongoing basis. By checking the data of your personas at regular intervals and revising existing texts, you can respond even better to your target group. When it is time to check and optimize candidate personas and thus recruiting texts, the following indications provide information:

• New recruiting and work trends are influencing the way candidates choose companies: These are, for example, a new career model, more flexible benefits and working time models. Especially when a new trend establishes itself in your industry, it helps to match it with the wishes of the candidate persona.
• Desirable candidates have new habits: Whereas home office was the exception before the corona pandemic, most workers have now become accustomed to it. A company with the option of working from home therefore has better chances if it communicates the home office arrangement transparently. Recruiters should also regularly check other habits, such as working methods and communication behavior, for convincing texts.
• The market and competition are changing: Artificial intelligence and candidate centricity are influencing the way we recruit professionals today. It is therefore worth taking a close look at new trends from a persona perspective and, if necessary, implementing them yourself.

• New tasks and strategies: Even with new tasks and strategies, it is necessary to adapt texts to suit the person. Using data on work behavior, preferences and stressors in everyday working life, recruiters can more easily strike the right note.
• The company is expanding: Those who expand transfer the recruiting strategy to target groups of other cultures, some of which differ both in their perception and in their way of working. For example, personas of German target groups cannot be transferred 1:1 to target groups of Asian origin. If the company wants to tap into new target groups, it must develop additional personas or optimize existing ones to take cultural aspects into account.

Would you like to make your recruiting even more efficient using data-based personas? Then please arrange a non-binding consultation appointment.