Persona Perspectives: Elevating Employee Engagement, DEIB and Talent Acquisition Efforts

I am just absolutely thrilled to be with my friend Melissa, on this journey of persona discovery and how to use them, why to use them. As you can see, one of the questions in the poll is, are you using them? If you don't know what personas are, I was, uh, the genesis of this idea for the webcast came 'cause Melissa and I were having this conversation about role-playing video games, of which we're both a fan of. And she was saying how even though you get to pick which person you want to be as you're playing the game, and even though the attributes that were ascribed to one character really, really held true to all of these intrinsic things that Melissa felt as a human being as an individual, she couldn't select it because of certain other things. Well, I I, why was it that you couldn't select it, Melissa? Well, it was the conversation about who I am versus who I wanted to be, right? And no matter how hard I tried to be, what I wanted within a game, I always reverted back to my actual humanity, who I actually am. So when I chose wrong, the game did not play quite a smoothie as I would've liked, and yet I do it again and again and again. So just, you know, in my everyday life when you have Netflix and it comes up like, who are you of all of the people that are watching on your account? I decided that for my little picture, I was going to be Ken from the Barbie movie. And every time I see that it's my name, it's like, can I be Ken? Can I not be Ken? But what I really love about personas is that as an employer branding professional, the essence of branding is it's a short code for the attributes that we want people to perceive about an organization, a product to service goods and everything. And it's the same with personas. And it's just wonderful to be able to actually consider our intentions what we're trying to do, whether it's on the talent acquisition side, whether it's on the employee engagement side, and really consider the short code of who the people are and the action that we want the people to take to really make the right decisions, as you said earlier. And I think that's what we're gonna be talking about. So I know you have a lot of things to do. If you wanna just give us, uh, share the results of the poll so that we could see who we are talking to. Zach, oh, great. All of, oh, a really nice blended audience, so many of whom are actually using personas, but there's a tremendous opportunity for those of you who are not using them to learn from this about how, why to use them. So with that said, I'm gonna turn it over to you, Melissa, Thank you so much. And I will take a moment to share my screen. Hopefully everyone can see that and it's the presentation and not just another image of me on top of an image. And then we're good to go. Before we go, lemme say that anybody who has questions, feel free to ask them as we're going through it. If it makes sense to interrupt, we can talk to the questions in real time. Otherwise we'll save them for the end. If we have gone up to the end of the hour, we will definitely get back to you with the answers. So don't be shy For anyone who knows me and who's listened to any of the talks that I've done before, you're not gonna throw me off. So if you have a question and it feels very timely, go ahead, take yourself off mute or send it over in chat. Um, I'm a parent of two kids, it takes a lot to throw me off. And so today we're going to talk about personas. I love personas. You got a little taste of my personality just in the conversation with Zach, with with Jody about the Star Wars, about the video games. I am all about characters and they're so, so powerful. So I'm thrilled to talk about this in terms of talent acquisition and then beyond. So for those of you who are in more than just talent acquisition, who have the double duties or from other areas, diversity, equity, inclusion, talent management, this is a very relevant and very powerful tool for you as well. So we'll talk about that, um, throughout the whole conversation. And before we jump into personas, I wanna tell a little story about how powerful this concept is when it comes to employer branding, when it comes to outreach for your candidates or engagement with your employees. And I'm gonna start with a shoe. Let's imagine a sneaker, probably some pops to mind. There might be a brand of choice, but a mid range decent sneaker for anyone who is into or who has worn sneakers before. There is a lot of overlap with all the sneakers that are out there, right? A mid-range sneaker for what it's look and feel. They're generally about the same. And they are super versatile. They're some shoots. So when you think about what a great use case for a shoe is, you could think about that couple that has just recently retired, active, healthy, excited to finally go on those adventures that they've been putting off for so long because of all these life demands, those walks, those hikes for which that sneaker would be ideal, or perhaps your parent or your active athlete. And what comes to mind with that sneaker is that game that you played as a kid when you all ran out onto the field to have a good time when school was out in the summer. That sneaker is a great shoe. But what if you ran an ad for that beautiful walk to a bunch of children? You think they'd be thinking, oh geez, I need that shoe. That is my sneaker right there, that beautiful sun speckled walk. That is me. Oh, or if you ran an ad with a bunch of kids playing on a field to sell that sneaker to a recently retired couple, would that work? No, they're not gonna see themselves in that story. You're not speaking to them. So while the sneaker might remain largely the same, how we brand it, how we reach our community to engage with them is very, very different. Based on the audience sales and marketing 1 0 1. Know your audience so you can resonate with them so that you can engage with them. So you can draw them in in a genuine way, but a genuine way that speaks to them. That's exactly what we're doing today. But rather than selling sneakers, we're selling jobs. We're selling our organization and people's interest in joining us. We're reaching out to the community of people that we wanna work with, our future employees, our current employees, to keep them employees. So our audience who we're talking to absolutely matters because the more we can understand them, the more we can engage with them, or the more we can meet them where they are to give them the messages they need to hear to make the choices to engage with us. But that's very difficult to do when you're thinking in abstract. What do people need to know about us? That's a very, very wide question. So what personas do is they add a level of humanity to the conversation. Because while it's hard to answer, what do people need, it's lot easier to answer what somebody needs. So personas are representations of all the different facets of humanity that we wanna engage in this case for our positions to be our employees, to stay with us as employees. And they make 'em human because then we can interact, then we can engage, then we can resonate and go to where they are. So personas are individuals. They can be real. They don't have to be real. You can make them up, but they embody a candidate. They embody a group of candidates or a need base of those candidates. They have to be realistic because you are now resonating with them. Because if you can resonate with your persona, you're resonating to a group of individuals that are your future employees or that Canada pull from what you're pulling your future employees. So they need to have realistic traits, that humanity piece, the personalities, the backgrounds, the demographics, the skills and experiences, the needs. Because then you will know what to address. And when you do that, your personas will help create a much more catered experience for your engagement. Whether that is your engagement for candidates throughout the hiring process, your employees throughout their employment. So with candidates, it's knowing where to look. If I have an idea in mind of the person that I'm talking to, I know where they are. So I know how to reach them. I know how they consume information. So I know how to catch their attention. I can now design my messaging, my outreach to resonate with them, their needs, their interests, address their concerns, not people, those personas. I can create candidate experiences that have them in mind so I can anticipate the needs and address them before anyone ever asks. Talk about inclusion, right? I'm so good at inclusion. I'm so good at creating the sense of belonging. You don't even need to ask. I've already got you covered. Why? Because I've already thought about you. And ultimately with personas, you can get the yes, you can earn the yes. So when you do give that offer, you get the yes in return and you get those employees. So they're very, very powerful tools, which begs the question, how do you create them? For those of you who've never used personas, present or past, those who've used personas outta context for different things, bringing that concept into ta, into hr, into DEI, how do you create them? So there's a basic way to do it. I'm gonna introduce you to just the basics and then you can go from there. But that will give us a starting point. So it starts with the needs. This is the bread and butter of talent acquisition. Usually they come in the forum of job descriptions, but it's a great place to start. You need to know the basics 'cause this is the group you're trying to resonate with. Then add the human, take it out of the abstract and into the personal. Because the more personal, the more you can interact with the personas, the more you can anticipate. Develop talking points that will give you all of the foundation for all of the messaging and the strategy and the outreach that you can then form those engagements around. Brainstorm the variations to flesh out those personas and then organize and consolidate. Because you don't wanna design things for 20, 30, 50 different people. So you wanna pull that in so that you're only thinking about a few of people to represent as much as possible. So let's go through this step by step to get a sense of what these steps are. First is list the needs. This one should be the relatively easy one. You should already have this. If you don't already have this in your in talent acquisition, I would recommend some other training. So you want to be very, very clear on what the needs are for the position positions, opportunities you're filling. That's the skills and abilities, it's the experiences. It's the expectations of success for those employees when they come on. What do they need to do to be successful? It's the environments that they need to thrive within. Are they virtual? Are they hybrid? Are they in person? Are you an email organization? Are you, let's text everybody all the time. Organization, what is that environment like? The organizational habits and needs, even the logistics. Am I able to get to the locations I need to get to? You want that solid foundation because this is the group you need to resonate with. And from a persona perspective, a lot of them are going to embody these or this will be flipped out. As you use your personas from job to job, it is okay to have personas that don't meet all these needs, the ones that aren't going to get the job because you wanna design the process for them too. But you wanna do that deliberately, not by surprise. Once you have the basics, now it's time to make them human, to make them characters you can interact with. This is what gives you, this is going to key in that humanity of us being able to interact with each other. Building bonds, building relationships with each other. So this is really important. Do not skip this. Give them a name. You are gonna be talking about them a lot. You don't want it to be human A, human B, oh, give them a name. Give them a personality with traits so you know how they're gonna react, what they're gonna care about. Give them demographics. Give them parental family status. Do they have dependences? Do they have things that are gonna be demanding their time outside of work? What are their career goals or their personal goals? What are their fears? What are their major needs and motivators? Because the more you flush out, the more you can react, the more you can predict. And that will give you so much power over how you can resonate back to that. You're not gonna sell a sneaker to a kid or to a young adult showing a commercial with a retired couple. It's not gonna hit these points of humanity. Even if it hits the needs of, I need a good sneaker to get me from point A to point B while keeping my feet safe and um, my back energized and all that other great stuff. I could be meeting the basic needs and completely missing the human. Human is super important. Once you flush out that human, now you can start developing some basic talking points. These are the things you want to hate when you go through those campaigns, those outreach messages, the conversations that you're gonna prep for when you're having interviews from another side. Just to, to extend this out, if once we go beyond talent acquisition, this is what you need to know from a talent engagement, how do I keep them interested? How do I keep 'em productive? How do I keep hold onto them so I'm getting that maximum out of that investment of these new employees? That's what these talking points are for. It generates all the other stuff. So it's answering some basic questions. Why would someone take your job? Or why would they not take your job? This persona, what does this persona care about? What are those things that even if they don't ask, they really need to know in order to decide if this is the right job, right? What needs are they gonna have that need, that need to be fulfilled before they're able to give their focus to get that productivity? Where are they literally? Where are they? How are you going to reach and engage with them? How do they search for jobs? How are they gonna find you or know that you exist? When you have an individual, you can answer these questions. So personas give you that ability to go into much more depth to answer these questions. Once you've got that base persona, now we can start. Now we can start getting creative and go into the variations. So brainstorm, who else, what other humans are in this candidate pool that I haven't represented yet with my persona? How are they different from my base persona? And be creative. I'm gonna give you one of my tips a little early. We're gonna come back to this. One of the best ways to get really creative and think through your true full candidate pool, employee base, whatever that group is, is to do this with a diverse group of people. Because the more diversity in those who are interacting in the brainstorm, who are contributing, they're using, everyone's pulling from their personal experiences, their backgrounds, their friends backgrounds, their families backgrounds. That's how we fuel these. We usually generate them from what we know. So as the much, as much as we can expand the what we know, the deeper this is going to be and the more powerful it's gonna be. So think people who came in in different roles with different education levels and different backgrounds, different demographics, different personal uh, um, needs. So whether you have people who have, uh, dependents in their children or their parents or anything else. So the more that you can pull that in different abilities, the more you'll have that represented within this brainstorming session. And then consolidate the rule of thumb. And marketing is usually between four and seven personas. If you have less than four, it's hard to represent, uh, a variety of humanity. If you have more than seven, it's really hard to create enough content. It becomes too burdensome to manage it. So the sweet spot is usually somewhere between four and seven personas. So when you have that brainstorm of all the possibilities of humanity, start organizing them. Have one persona carry multiple things. So you've got that really extroverted person who has to have interaction in order to thrive, who might also be a parent or also have the dependence. So the more that you can without having it contradict in a single human pile on a few different things so that you have all those attributes represented and that gives you a cast of characters that you can now use to build out your programs, which is great in theory. But let's start with an example how this would actually look. So I want you to meet Jasmine, full disclosure before we jump in. Jasmine and I have been together for many, many years. Jasmine is one of my core personas I've used in every position I've had from the very beginning. She's also a friend, literally she's designed after a close friend of mine. So a lot of her personality, her human traits are very personal because I know her. And that was a great way to start. When I began my careers, when I started using personas, I started with what I know and I built out from there. So while this part with the needs, this is creative based on what a position might be when we get to the human, that's a real human I'm describing and it's a great example of how you can build a base persona is start with who you know. Start with some people who are influencers, ideally not someone who already works in the organization, especially in the role because what you don't wanna do is try to find another and then actual person who already holds the job. So take a step back from that. Choose someone who's not in the role, ideally not already in the company, but someone that you do know is a great way to start if you've never done it. So with Jasmine, we start with the needs. I am hiring for a developer, a software developer. So she's gotta be a software developer able to code in so many languages. I'm a company that looks at very high quality content. So I want someone who's got high quality in that can prove they have high quality in their designs. And then whatever else, maybe it's English speaking teams. So it needs to be somebody who's very comfortable interacting with English speaking teams has some times that they have to be available because of standups. Whatever these things are. These are the easy ones. But now, now I need to know Jasmine because she is more than just a developer. She is more than just someone who's got B2B mobile application experience, right? There's a lot more to her than that. So let's start giving her personality. We gave her a name. So we gave her, give her some demographic. She's 40. She's a 41-year-old black woman that lives in the suburbs of dc. She's got two children, both of them very active. One's an athlete, one's a performer. She's constantly interacting with her kids, give her personality, no nonsense. She's got an assertive personality and a great sense of humor, always joking around. She respects people who try and has no time for people who lie. She needs that team that is not afraid to say the truth and move forward. She is a coder. She is not somebody who wants to manage people. That's not what she's driven to do. But she's very career oriented. Anyone ever meet a coder like that? An engineer like that? Love what they do. Not a super fan of managing people, but want that career progression. It's actually a fairly bullseye type of, uh, personality trait, right? So you can start with the ones that are very common. Fastest way to lose Jasmine from when you're thinking about keeping her after you employ her is for her to feel undervalued. So in terms of your talent management, in terms of how you're gonna interact with her, you wanna make sure that she knows she's appreciated. She already knows she's good, but she needs to know that other people recognize it. Her biggest challenge also not uncommon, is work-life balance. This is really important to her, but it also doesn't come easily. So as we're thinking about how to engage with her and get her excited about the job, as well as how to retain her, keep that in mind. She's motivated by ra, by rank, by influence. Money is part of that. It's not the core. She's not gonna be won over just by by money, but it does have to play a role. And she's active in incl in LinkedIn. Never bothers with social media. Now that you know all this about Jasmine, I bet you're already thinking about how you would reach out to her, how you would engage with her to bring her on board for a position, not a developer. Her. That's where those talking points come in. That's where the strength comes in with these personas because I can engage with her. I know Jasmine, I just explained who she is. How would I send an email to her? Where would I go? What questions would I make sure I have answers? If I'm engaging with her, why would she say yes or no to a job that I offer her when I really want her to say yes, she's not just random human developer person anymore. So I can create messaging that is much, much stronger, much, much more resonating and answer these questions. Now that I've got my core, my my foundational persona, let's start thinking about the variations. This is that brainstorm piece because not all my candidates are gonna be like Jasmine. There's going to be all sorts of different candidates in there. I want them represented within my four to seven people so that I've got the flexibility, I've got the reach across a variety of the humans that I'm going to be interacting with. But in the way that brings that personal touch of knowing them. So what other goals and aspirations are common for this pool of candidates? What about ones that might not be super common or jump out, but they are common among humanity, personal needs, backgrounds, personalities, demographics, changing all of these variation making variations of all of these will give us a lot of information to start thinking through how I'm gonna market to different market segments and engage how I'm gonna bring them through what questions I'm going to answer so I'm ready. And then organize so that you're doing as much heavy lifting with each of your personas as you can give them multiple traits that you wanna make sure you cover within your designs. You can have someone that's super extroverted and really wants to be around people. They thrive with interactions and is also remote. So you can put multiple things onto single personas and that will allow you to look at all the different angles of, am I answering their questions? Am I meeting their needs or am I going to make the decision that I can't meet their needs? And this is not gonna be something I can cater to. That happens. But you want it to happen deliberately because you've interacted with that persona to see that I cannot get that persona to a thriving state. I can't allow for them to be remote and not relocate and thrive in this position. And what you'll end up with is a cast of characters and instead of saying, what do my candidates need? How am I going to message to my candidates? Now we're talking about Joe and Jasmine. We're talking about Juliana and we're talking about John. Now I can have much more in-depth conversations to make those designs. And if you might've noticed, I dunno why I picked up this habit, but I did so for 20 years. All of my personas have always had Jay names. Jody, I think you agree Jay names. They're the best. So then let's take a look at how you would use the personas, how you would use, you've gone through all of this to flesh out a cast of characters that represent your candidate pool, that represent your employees, that represent a group of people you want to interact with for some purpose, selling, content selling, product selling, uh, your company. So you use them to find your candidates. Where are they? How am I gonna reach them? With Jasmine, LinkedIn, if you run a bunch of social media campaigns, she's gonna miss it. She has no time for social media, no interest in social media, but she might be involved in professional groups. Being in the suburbs of DC looking at some professional groups that she would get be engaged in, could be a great way to reach her. Maybe she's active with her alma mater. Another great way to reach Jasmine or through a staffing agency. But it's not one size fits all. She's not gonna respond to chats, she's not gonna respond to social media. She's not looking for a job. So if you just post it on your website, she's not gonna find it. So if you go through each of your personas, how am I gonna gonna reach? How am I gonna reach John? How am I gonna reach Juliana? How am I gonna reach Jasmine? You're gonna have a nice list of ways to reach out to those candidate pools and diversify all of these different candidates with all of these different needs coming in. Then how res, how are you gonna resonate? Because I want them to be interested and engage with me. So how are you gonna resonate with Joe? And I know we didn't do a background on Joe, but let's pretend we did. So we have Joe, the person. Joe is also about work-life balance. He's got some grandkids, young, new grandkids. He wants to spend time with them. So he needs to hear about the balance. He needs to know that he can thrive in work, but also not feel guilty about spending time with his new grandchildren. He is done with management. So if I wanna resonate with Joe, he wants to be a a senior contributor. He wants to be highly valued. He does not wanna manage people. Is there a place for him where he's celebrated for what he brings with what he wants to bring? He's thinking about retirement. So 401k matching is a big deal for him. He's building up the end of that, that um, uh, retirement planning and all of that other stuff. He's on his last five to 10 years. So that's gonna resonate really well with him. And knowing that not only do you understand prepping for retirement, but you are part of it as an organization and he wants opportunities to mentor and coach. Well, he's done with management. He's done that. He's done with it. It doesn't mean he's done interacting with people and helping people grow. So he's gonna resonate. What's gonna resonate with him is those relationships that he can give back and he can develop the next generation without having that management. So the, because I know Joe, because Joe has a background, I know things that are gonna resonate with him, all genuine. But it's a different group of things that I would uh, emphasize than if I were talking to, to Juliana or if I were talking to Jasmine. So I'm ready with these. What does Juliana need? Not all of your candidates or your employees are going to ask the questions they need to ask. Not all of them are going to verbalize the needs that they have, but if they don't get those needs met, they either aren't gonna say yes to the offer or you're going to lose them through attrition. So if I can think through what Juliana needs and anticipate it, then my chances of bringing her through the process of really doing a good job of bidirectionally, evaluating if she's gonna be a good fit for the organization and then retaining her goes way up. So Juliana for example, has autism. She might need a few things like audio only options for virtual interviews. It will be really helpful little breaks between person to person interviews, give her a chance to recharge clear direction so she knows from point A to point B to point C what she needs to do to get through the interview process. And making sure that the people who in to interview her are comfortable with not making the eye contact that have been trained to listen to the answers and give space for the answers and not judge on some of the social cues that we're used to judging on. Anticipating those needs are gonna make Juliana's process much, much better. So her candidate engagement, her experience is gonna be so much better and we're gonna get a much better evaluation of her because we've thought through beforehand what Juliana needs and then earning the yes, you've gone through a lot of work. The last thing you wanna do is get to the end. Be ready to bring your candidate on board. I'm so excited to give you this news. We wanna hire you and then go, thank you. But no, you want to get that? Yes. So thinking through with your personas, how do I earn John's? Yes. How do I get him to say yes with a big smile when I give him that offer, knowing what he cares about, what's going to, what's going to win him over? And having that woven throughout the experience, having that part of the offer conversation is gonna help earn that. Yes. Which means we need to know John, his workable, his flexible working, he's he is on the path upwards. He needs to have that career mobility. So talking about that, right? With the offer, this is the beginning of a journey, not the end point. He's very collaborative. He loves working with people. So showcasing throughout the process those collaborative tools that even if he's a remote worker or working with remote team, he's got a lot of collaborative access. So because I was able to design processes for each of these people that represent groups, now I can choose based on as I interact with real candidates. Are they a John? Are they more a jasmine? Maybe they got a little Juliana going on. So I can start adjusting based on all of this work that I've done to match the persona more or less with the person, make sure they've got a great experience. 'cause I've thought through everything that's the power of personas. That's why those Super Bowl ads seem to have a few things in common, but they tend to work. They've done a lot of research on the people, on the audience that they're reaching with that investment. So when you do the research on the people that you're reaching with the investment that you're making, it's gonna have so much more power to it. So from some quick tips as you're building up your personas as you're starting this journey or maybe refreshing it if you already have personas, start with real people. It's so much easier. I know I said that tip before, it's so much easier to flesh out personalities of people who with with personalities than trying to make them up. Do not choose people who are already on those teams. You don't wanna get that replication problem where I just want another Jodi. 'cause Jodi's so amazing. Yes she is, but there are a lot of amazing people and we don't wanna replicate the exact same person over and over again. So pick people who are not already part of the team to be your reference points. It doesn't mean that everything about them is the same, but it helps to start with a reference point then to start fresh. If you don't know anybody and you're trying to represent some aspect, some attribute of humanity, either diversify the team that's working on it or go to a second source material. I mean like entertainment or something like that. At least have something. So you've got that, that real human aspect to it. And you're thinking through what some of those things might mean. I said this one as well, diversity help. So much. So for those of you who have the DEI role or have a piece of their role in DEI, this is one of those places where the, the groups that you work with jump right in there. Not a ton of value for your organizations. Engage your community. Because the more diversity you bring to these brainstorming sessions, to creating these personas, the more realistic and holistic they're going to be. Once you start with that cast of characters, you've got the beginnings of that play. The what if game. What if they aren't willing to relocate? What if they're in a wheelchair, but we didn't know it until they show up for their interview? What if they're three months pregnant? What if all of these what ifs are really valuable for thinking through all the facets? What if they think they're a great people manager? They're not a great people manager. Not that that's ever happened. But then you could think through what you will do with those what ifs scenarios. And sometimes the answer is, mm, no, if they're not willing to relocate, we cannot accommodate that. When you hit a no with the what ifs, not a here's how we'll handle it, here's what the questions we need to answer, but a hit a, we're not gonna do this. Add that to the needs if they're not already there. So any note, no. If they won't relocate, we cannot hire them. We really need someone who can be in the office at least two days a week and we're not paying for that many plane tickets. Great. Add to the needs that they must be located within an X amount of region so that they can make it into the office two days a week. Or they must be able to make it into the office on their own dime two days a week. However you want to, to, um, word that. But if it is a no, we won't do it. You've just identified another need. And then finally, and I wish this went without saying, but it does because of so many experiences. Use them. Use those personas. You spent a ton of energy creating them. So every conversation when you're talking about your marketing collateral, when you're talking about your website for your new jobs, when you're thinking about changing that little blurb for your career, what it's like to work here, when you're thinking about retention and employee engagement, talk about not what are we gonna do for our employees, but what does Jasmine need? Hey, is John getting what he needs? Is he feeling comfortable? Has Joe gotten, uh, to that level that he wants to get to? Is Juliana still engaged when you talk about them, when you're using the personas and they become part of the conversation, you're gonna get a lot more depth. You're going to get a lot more human into all of these designs and it's gonna resonate a lot more with, with the, the totality of your candidate and employee and don't let perfect get in the way of good enough. I know some of us are perfectionists, I dunno how many on this, this, uh, webinar are perfectionists and they really don't wanna move forward with anything until they've thought through every facet. And they're super excited about all these perfect personas down to the pictures and the backgrounds. And that's awesome. And that could take months and months and months and you don't wanna wait that long. So when you get to a good enough go for it and then iterate as you go. You can always perfect. You can always get better, but you don't start getting better until you start. So remember, we start at the beginning. We don't start at the end and be comfortable with the good enough and then learn as you go and go iterative. That way you can get the most value out of every single one of these personas as they evolve. And with that, I know I've covered a lot of information and I'm very excited to hear your questions, your thoughts. Let's jump in. Zach, do you wanna pop on camera again? I know that I have a lot of things that I just wanna ask away, but I also encourage the audience, particularly people that are already using personas right in the chat, tell us how this might resonate. And also anybody that has questions in the end. But one of the things that I found really fascinating and I loved it, was one of the, uh, the things that we were trying to identify. You had a list of things and one of them was, if we know someone's greatest fear. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how to add that to the roster. Why is that question on the list? What do you do if you know someone's greatest fear? I love that question because so many of us as humans, one of the things a lot of us have in common is we are influenced heavily if not ruled by fears. And so knowing what those fears are will help dissipate them or respond to them so that we can help our candidates make the right choices. We can engage with our employees and get them out of lock states like fear of making a mistake, for example. So knowing those fears allow us to respond to them. Really common ones, fear of making mistakes. That one happens all the time. That one is common, especially among people who have come from environments that are very heavy anti mistake. If anyone's ever worked in those environments where God forbid you take a misstep and you get penalized. So it's actually better to do nothing than to do something and be wrong. And if they're moving into an environment where that doesn't work and you haven't thought that through, you might end up with this situation where people feel like they're not being decisive enough, they're not able to make decisions, they're not able to move forward, and that could be a fear base. So understanding that fear will help them get over it because you can talk about, hey, we are not afraid to fail. We're afraid to, uh, not to learn from our failure and shift that over, to change that mindset to put them in a state of now I can be successful. Other common fears are things like, I can't get that work life balance. You're gonna demand so much of me. I'm gonna fail at the other aspects of my life. I won't have a growth opportunity. I'll get stuck. I'm not gonna be seen as a value add. People are going to, um, take advantage of me again. Unfortunately, that one gets programmed in because they come from cultures where they were taking advantage of and underappreciated. And so the steps to unravel that and get them into a state of thriving, this is especially important in talent management and talent engagement so that you can unlock the full potential. You gotta know what might be holding that potential back. So those are some examples of fears. The more you know about them, the more you're able to address them and remove those fears from being blockers from having awesome, uh, hires and awesome candidates or awesome employees. Or even when you mention it like the reverse side of it, which is that if somebody's greatest fear is that lack of stability that they're going to join an organization, lead very secure employment to go to something a little more risky, it might just be that this isn't the right opportunity for them. So you can to kind of recruit for the retention factors that, uh, z and I were on a call this morning where they're not a handholding kind of a culture. They're more of an empowerment culture. So if you are looking to bring on somebody and their persona is they love to know more about everything and they want somebody to sit beside them and show them the ropes and be mentored, it just might not be a good fit. Yes. And it's okay for people to say no when you're gonna lose them anyway. Um, when they're not a good fit for them, they're not going to thrive in your environment. And it's such a good point. Uh, there's oftentimes where I'll be very, very blunt with how I describe things. If you're the type of person who knows, this is what you're gonna be responsible for this week and here's how you're gonna be successful, you might hate this job, we're more like, so what are we doing now? And let's make it up as we go along. Um, the the pacing, and a lot of times people will throw around concepts like fast pace. You need to define it. Your personas don't know what that means. Your your candidates don't know what that means. So define what you mean by terms that we generally use, like fast pace and not afraid to fail. Give examples. That's a great way for them to then evaluate is what they're comfortable with matching what with what you have to offer or not. The words aren't gonna be enough show don't tell. So we have some questions coming in. Let me ask you, Melissa, are you familiar with the term micro value proposition? I am not. I can guess what it's Uh, okay, you can do that. Uh, go ahead. No, no, go ahead. Go please. Were you, So it's, uh, instead of an employer value proposition, one employer value proposition for that top of the employer brand architecture, you create these micro value propositions that are associated with, and I, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that they're associated more with particular geographies or perhaps a particular role. So the question that came in is how do you feel about marrying personas with micro value propositions? So are, That's exactly what you're doing. So I think that's a really insightful question because what to, to not have them married is kind of an odd way to go, right? You're going to lock them to some sort of organizational structure, whether it's a region, people who share a need for a region or a market that shares a need or it's a group that has some shared need. That's exactly how you're organizing them so that they resonate best with each piece of your market. Your market being a target market for sales, your market being a target market for future employees future, Absolutely. Believe it or not, I totally subscribe to that. Mm-Hmm. Um, another fantastic question. Do you think personality tests can help identify personas already represented in the employee team? That is an awesome question. So personality tests give you a lot about an individual. If you have personalities that you're seeing over and over again, absolutely you can make them a persona. The the thing I would caution against is do not make personalities a requirement or a need for the job. That's where they, it becomes problematic because I'm an introvert or an extrovert because I have the, I'm going to make a decision first and figure out the details later, or I'm gonna tell me every detail first before I can make a decision. Does not necessarily dictate if I'm good or bad for particular position or company. What it does do is change the way that you would interact with me from a talent management perspective. So understanding those personas and how to best engage, awesome. Understanding those personas to determine who to hire. Not good. In fact, you wanna have as much diversity as you can within personas because you want to have the aggressives matched with the conservatives because that will give you the balance that never comes in every individual, but you really need for all your teams in your organization. Right. That's a great, great question and a wonderful answer. Thank you. Another question, should you start with the average stats for the job profiles you are creating personas for? Um, I like to do that though. Let me say big caveat because we started with there. This is for that first round, what you're gonna find you're doing is you're gonna keep your people and rotate out the, um, the specifics of skills and requirements and things like that. You're gonna keep them. So if you're thinking about stats in terms of the needs of the job, yes, start there. But then they're the things that are gonna rotate all the time. The people part, the human part's gonna stay. If you're thinking about your stats, like your demographics, so I have 32% women, so 32% of my personas are gonna be female. That can backfire on you because your, your role is not necessarily to keep the stats that you already have. It's making sure that you're addressing the needs across your potential candidate base. So if you wanna start with stats, start with the stats of your candidate pool, not the stats of your employee pool. That could be difficult to do. So sometimes just starting with, let's just try to represent everybody who's a viable candidate and then you can perfect that later as you learn more about your candidate pools. I love that. I love that. There's just been so much great content. One of the things that I really liked was how you started by kind of limiting the number of personas, which makes it seem so achievable. Because when you do the diligence and then you take them as we do in our communications or employer branding, and then you go and you put every touch point in their consideration and the kinds of questions that you ask, it may seem so arduous if you have eight to 10 different ones. But then if you say, okay, let's just, you know, it's like the consolidation of post-it notes in a research exercise, put the post-it notes together and say, okay, how can we fuse these personas knowing that we can go off road a little bit for some of them? I love that you do that, Zach, what'd you think? It, It helps a lot. It really does. And there's a lot you can do with every individual. You can make them very rich and then dial up and back the pieces that you need for those particular conversations. You don't need every aspect of every human or your persona equivalents for every conversation. For example, if you're thinking about how outreach, where am I going to invest to reach those eyeballs in order to get a candidate pool? You're not thinking necessarily at that point about what you're gonna say in the later stage of the interview process. You're just thinking about where are they and how are they consuming information. So even those pieces, you're taking pieces of those personas to make it as productive for those investments as possible. Love it. I had, uh, one follow up question. I was thinking in my head for those groups in the, the community here who are like, Hey, we, we did this. We created personas two years ago. So, uh, I guess my question is like, how often should we be revisiting these personas or reevaluating 'em and redeveloping and whatnot? Is it certain moments when you're changing strategy? Is there, you know, certain inflection points or is there kind of a routine to it? I'm just curious on, on that aspect. I, I love that. There's a few different ways that you can look at at that question. One is, do you already have a cadence for refresh? Some organizations already have refresh cadences, whether it's what you're charging for your products or what you're offering in your benefits. You've got that refresh cycle there. You can start with that in whatever that cadence is. Then take a look at those inflection points. There are gonna be times, and you gave a great example, I'm going into a new market. I'm changing my strategy. So there's gonna be times that are inflection points that are changing the organization and already naturally have a requirement around refreshing materials. The materials that I use to explain our company don't work anymore because we just hit an inflection point. So I'm refreshing that. Anyway, let's take a quick look at those personas. You don't wanna overburden yourself. Most of the time every year is too much. You're not changing that much year over year. Maybe there's a position or two that didn't exist before. For those of you who might be dabbling in AI for the first time, for example, you might need to add a persona or add a few attributes to existing personas to get that piece in there. Um, but for the most part, you don't wanna overdo it. It's usually not an annual thing except for a couple of refresh points here and there. So I recommend start with the cycle you already have and um, watch for those inflection points to then add that to it. Once you get a little further down and you have some experience with it, you're gonna just like any other material that you know, you know, if you're in marketing, you kind of know when you need to refresh some of those older product descriptions and things like that. It will be very similar. You'll kind of feel like those are not the personas, those that's not the, the pools that we're tapping into or those are not the pools that represent everything we wanna tap into, which will be more common. We're missing something. Let's add, Yeah, it makes me think about obviously the landscape of the world, the, the economic climate we're in and the work environments. There's been a lot of inflection points over the last couple years. So there's probably, uh, a, probably a opportunity here for many of us to revisit that. I'm even thinking about our community here at achieving engagement, right? Like who are our personas that we're serving and designing these learning experiences for? Um, and, and it also makes me think about like some of the obviously efforts in the world of inclusion and diversity and some of the initiatives people are leading on those fronts. I'm assuming there's, you know, expansion and personas that are also part of those initiatives. So, uh, this was amazing. Melissa and Jody, thank you so much. This was such a great session. Really appreciate you sharing all of this amazing guidance with our community. Thank you for being here. And I just wanna point out this email address. We had a couple of questions at the end. If you can't read it, Melissa, there it is, M Dobbins at Career Place. Reach out to her, she'll answer all of your questions plus more. Um, brilliant, brilliant presentation. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you all very much. I appreciate it. Yeah, that was amazing. I definitely encourage you, if you're going through an inflection point right now, which I'm assuming most of us are, connect with Melissa and Jody, follow up with them, ask 'em some questions, bring them in for some coaching support. Really amazing work. They're leading in this space. We share their LinkedIns in the chat as well so you can connect with them there. Otherwise obviously Melissa sharing our information on the screen here and for those of you that want to take advantage of the SHM and HRCI credits, we put those in the chat as well. But yeah, thank you so much to the two of you. This was such a great session. I learned so much from the both of you and, uh, I'm excited to see what kind of personas we can create on our end. So, uh, thank you again and thank you everyone for joining today's session and have a great rest of your afternoons.

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