Passive Candidate Engagement using Persona – iOS Mobile App Developer Case Study

In our previous passive candidate engagement discussion, we talked about the most important information recruiters need to know is how your open position would be a desirable career progression for the candidate. To establish this, we need to collect intelligence about our candidates in addition to understanding the position itself.  Assuming you’ll work with the hiring manager to gather both the requirements and selling points for the open position, we’ll focus our discussion on the candidate side in this blog.

The need for building a strong case of how our open position would be a beneficial career move is especially crucial when recruiting passive candidates.  By applying a widely used tool and technique by the marketing professionals, called persona, we can build a detailed candidate profile and develop the corresponding AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) engagement plan. This process will make how to best engage and motivate our candidates become crystal clear.

To demonstrate how to apply this process in a real world situation, we’ll do an in-depth case study for a fictional iOS developer, using realistic data.

1. Basic Career and Demographic Information

These are pieces of information you can gather fairly easily from the candidate’s online profiles (LinkedIn, resume, “About Me,” etc.) and some of your own educated guesses.

2. Candidate Intelligence Goal

The goal is not to collect materials to write the candidate’s biography; we are looking for the essential information that would influence the candidate’s decision regarding a potential career move. This means we want to know how the candidate would describe their “requirements” for a job change.

3. The Missing Pieces that You May or May Not Get

Now it’s time to fill the gap between the basic information we can get in Step 1 and our candidate intelligence goal in Step 2. There will be many pieces of missing information about your candidate. It’s very important to remember that you don’t need to have all of them AND you don’t need to gather them all in one conversation. Focus on the piece(s) of information YOU need so you can move your candidate forward to the next step.

The End Result – Developing Your AIDA Plan

All the hard work is about to pay off.

With this recruiting plan based on personalized AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), you will have much stronger candidate engagement and, therefore, a higher success rate in recruiting and hiring your passive candidates.

Ready to use your passive candidate persona to develop an on-target AIDA engagement action plan? Here’s your online, fill-able, print-able candidate persona template.

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