Dive Brief:

• HR can borrow a marketing strategy to create “candidate personas” for recruiting top talent, says CIO. Candidate personas are fictional representatives of ideal candidates.
• The first step in the process is envisioning ideal talents based on such characteristics like how they spend their days and what their hobbies are, activities, and work and personal concerns, CIO learned from Maren Hogan, CEO of Red Branch Media, at a SourceCon session last week in Anaheim, CA.
• The second step in creating a candidate persona is gathering information based on the representation from existing sources like LinkedIn and social media sites, says CIO. The third step is analyzing the data to find out how the candidate’s personal and family issues mesh with their experience, professional skills and history.

 Dive Insight:

AI and machine learning in the HR space have been working toward this capability for some time. Creating candidate personas allows HR to envision the right talent for a job vacancy or future opening, instead of looking at candidates’ credentials on resumes and applications and hoping for the right fit.

The process also includes steps for hiring ideal talent without sacrificing diversity goals. Algorithms have already been tapped to try and ease biases present within the recruiting process. Perhaps the most practical way of maintaining diversity hiring is to envision qualities that might reflect on cultural, gender and other differences in the first step of the process.