Personas and neuro-employer branding

People are gut decision-makers. This is true for many decisions, especially when it comes to choosing a partner: If you are deeply in love, you don't care whether your chosen one has little money, lives in the middle of nowhere or is perhaps not that attractive - the butterflies in your stomach decide.

It's exactly the same when it comes to choosing a job: Have you ever had the feeling that the job description describes you perfectly, the salary is good, the benefits are attractive and yet that "certain something" was missing to send off the application? And then perhaps you couldn't even pinpoint whether it was the tone, the imagery or something else, but "somehow it didn't fit"? Or the other way around: that it "fit" so well that a slightly lower salary was no drama?

Marketers also like to take advantage of our tendency to make gut decisions and use emotional images, background music and even smells to entice us to make purchases that we would probably not make so easily "in our right mind". To do this, they combine demographic, psychographic and behavioral data and also rely on the "Big Five" model of personality traits.

What is neuro-recruiting?

For some time now, HR has been looking more and more closely at marketers and is doing well to do so: Some offer products, others jobs, some are looking for buyers, others for candidates, but the process is basically the same.

The latest development based on this logic is so-called "neurorecruiting", in which neuroscientific findings and those from marketing practice help to make recruiting more personalized and therefore more effective. An important learning from this approach is that although rational arguments for a company or job are a fine - and necessary - thing, they are far from sufficient to attract the desired candidates. Precisely because we are highly emotional beings - and this applies right up to the CEO and the German Chancellor - who make up to 95% of decisions unconsciously and emotionally controlled on "autopilot".

With feeling to success

Stories that touch us also stick with us. This is another reason why companies that are good at storytelling are particularly popular and ultimately economically successful (e.g. IKEA).
Classic recruiting still relies a lot on facts: Salary, duties, vacation days, location. Companies that manage to appeal to their desired candidates on an emotional level are the ones that score the most points. Ideally, someone should first say: "I would like to work at company XY" - and only then look to see if there are any vacancies there.

How do you do that? By thinking and empathizing deeply with the desired candidates. What moves them, what motivates them, what scares them, what inspires them? What do they want to stand up for? What do they want to achieve and - quite selfishly - win over? The Big Five model and the classic Sinus-Millieus offer initial clues from which you can glean a lot.
You can only really immerse yourself in the world of your ideal candidates and design your own employer branding in such a way that it appeals to the emotional and cognitive needs of potential employees and establishes a strong and authentic connection with them if you know them personally. And you need to know them much better than you get to know a person in a job interview and, above all, well before the interview takes place.

If you can do it, you can:

• tell the right stories with emotionally appealing messages to positively shape the corporate image

• Creating trust through transparent communication and an authentic, consistent image of the corporate culture

• Use design and visual elements that positively stimulate the brain to strengthen company perception

Personas to empathize with

As much as you should rely on instinct to attract candidates, you should not let your gut feeling guide your own approach. The rational approach here is: data instead of guesswork!
Data-based candidate personas create a feeling, but based on hard facts. This is the persona recipe for success. Candidate personas are fictitious but possible people who very accurately represent the ideal candidate. In addition to demographics and requirements profile, they contain wishes, fears, goals, interests, challenges, pain points, character traits, habits, values, media consumption, purchasing behavior, family relationships, etc., photo and name - an almost real person that you know completely from the moment you meet them. You can present them to the team, managers, the HR department and the partners of creative agencies, for example, so that everyone can empathize with them. And on the basis of this, switch on the right "emotional buttons" when recruiting.

Sources:

Kahnemann, Daniel (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.