Executive War Rooms are converged upon and voices are raised… strategic initiatives are argued as Quarterly and Annual plans are created in organizations across the globe. 75% of these plans do not include an engagement plan or strategy, even though 90% of Executives admit engagement impacts business and success.

Executives are responsible for aggregating data and creating strategic plans…

HR and/or Hiring Managers are responsible for finding the people to execute these plans…

I believe it should be easy to see the disconnect here. This fragmented strategy is the leading cause of under performance.

Furthermore, HR does not specialize in your department nor do the majority of Hiring Managers have enough experience to hire correctly.

So how do we create a strategy that will allow the Executive to be a part of the hiring process? How do we do this in a way that scales throughout the entire department and organization?

First we have to be resigned that Executives, Directors, and Hiring Managers all need to be a part of the talent acquisition process. If you think you are too busy I would ask you to reconsider. Your plans are only as good as the people executing them.

Creating a solution that scales and allows for Executive and Director level influence to drive recruitment and hiring while also minimizing their time within the process is critical. The solution is Employee Personas.

Employee Personas

An employee persona is an archetypal representation of the candidate best fit for the company, a department and ultimately a role. It is a scalable representation of your ideal candidate that is easily communicated throughout the company and your department.

Elements of an employee persona profile

Values — Tony Hsieh professes he wish he had created values for Zappos from the very start. No matter what size your company, you need to have core values that explain the common core thread amongst all team members. You will use these values to evaluate candidates at every step of the process.

Skill sets — What skills are necessary for this person to be successful? This is the most common outline that already exists in your head. It is critically important, it’s just not the only thing that needs to be evaluated.

Drivers— Their priorities are critical to understanding what’s important to to your ideal candidate. Do they strive to advance within a company, or do they prefer to be great at what they do and progress within the role itself? Do they value high salaries or potential long term interest (stock options) in the company they work for? Is a self funded company more attractive than then the stress that comes with investors? How do they like to be led? Understanding the possible drivers is critical to your ability to attract and acquire top talent.

The benefits of employee personas

Employee personas allow the Executive to strategically ensure the right type of people are being hired to carry out their initiatives. Further, these personas empower your company to be more effective in the four critical areas of recruitment.

1. Target and attract the right type of candidates.
2. Create effective filters and interview processes that help hiring managers effectively evaluate talent and remove bad fit candidates.
3. Better convey the benefits of your company so you can eventually win the game of acquiring the right candidate.
4. Ultimately retain a highly engaged and productive team member.

Your ability to build effective strategies and processes around each of these areas will ultimately determine your ability to build highly engaged and productive teams. Spending this critical time upfront is essential for saving an extraordinary amount of time in the future as your managers sift through fewer bad fit resumes, interview fewer bad fit candidates, find the best candidate faster, and spend less time ultimately managing that person to be highly productive for the company. In my mind, the question has always been, can I afford not to do this? And the answer is always a resounding NO.

How to create an employee persona

Bring together the leadership team of your department. In this meeting, discuss as a group the three critical areas of the persona.

The core of your employee persona will be the core values for the company or department. These have to be created first and foremost without exception. If you don’t have buy in from the rest of the Executive team, create your own for your department. Values are the most critical hiring criteria and the hardest to uncover. An amazing example of company values and how they drive desired performance can be found at Netflix. Share this Culture doc with your team before the meeting and allow the discussion to flow from there.

Skill set and Drivers are the criteria most commonly created today, so hash up the current ideas around these and allow the conversation to evolve through multiple view points. Document the key takeaways from all of these discussions.

After version one of your personas have been created, it is time for the research phase. Have your hiring managers conduct informal interviews with current members of their team. Team members who are “A+ players” as well as team members who are “D players” to ensure you gain a comprehensive understanding of the key factors that make your ideal candidate different. Interviewing your A+ players will give you the obvious data points necessary to create the persona. Interviewing “D players” will give critical insights that will help you better define your ideal candidate.

Ensure that these conversations are not formal interviews. The formality can create contrived answers that don’t get you to the real essence of what you are trying to capture. Instead, take these people out for lunch or coffee. Have an informal conversation that dives into the three persona areas above in a way that will allow you to understand their true perspective. Don’t lead team members into specific answers that match your original criteria. Allowing for unbiased feedback will create the best results.

Once this data is collected, meet as a leadership team again and create the personas for each team and role using the initial conclusions drawn in the first discussion with the research phase. Each persona will be extensions of one another. If you find that each role’s persona is completely different then something is wrong.

Areas of caution when creating employee personas

“You can’t build a team with all point guards.” The former head of Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney, Sallie Krawcheck explains how she builds teams and the dire need for diversity. Don’t get so specific with your persona that you end up hiring a team full of the same people. There will be a core set of must-haves, and then there will be a longer list of nice-to-haves. Your eventual hires will vary in the nice-to-have elements they bring to the table and that is good. This diversity will increase collaboration and innovation within your team.

Similarly, you cannot get so specific that you are appearing to be prejudice. Age, race, gender, religious affiliation etc are to be avoided at all costs. I believe the twitter-verse has taught us this is not automatically understood. #HasJustineLandedYet ☺

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