Have you ever taken on a client who may not have been the ideal client? They may be the wrong sized company, not have best practices in place, or be in a slightly different industry than you were hoping for.
There are several different reasons why someone might not be the ideal partner (and this can go either way) and no company wants that. We all want to be clients of choice and be capable of being selective of our current client base. But where do you start determining who your ideal partner is? I’ve outlined a few simple steps to narrow in on that buyer persona.
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Definition of a Buyer Persona
As HubSpot describes, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.” Buyer personas are designed to be a realistic version of the ideal person you’d like to have as a client.
Determine the Title of Your Buyer Persona
Most recruiting firms deal with two to three different people when working with their clients. The people I typically see are the HR Director, the CEO/CFO/COO, or someone supporting the office who’s been tasked with finding a recruiting firm, such an Office Manager, Marketing Coordinator, or Executive Assistant (depending on the size of the company). There could be a few other titles or positions, but these seem to be the most common ones we see in the recruiting industry.
The next step is to narrow it down to one ideal persona. In this case, I’ll say our ideal buyer persona is the HR Director.
Curate the details of your buyer persona
If our persona is the HR Director, we want to gather all the details about this person. We can say on average, this person is usually a female, usually middle-aged, and has been in the industry for about 15 years. She is most likely married, has a few children, and lives within 20-30 miles of her office. She’s worked in the recruiting space of HR before, but her primary job is not to recruit new members of the company. The company is mid-sized, about 300-400 employees, so she has many different initiatives to work on.
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Design the Buyer Persona Story
Here is the story we can now put together about our persona:
Human Resources Hallie
Hallie is 42 years old, married, and has three kids (aged 6, 10 and 13.) She works as the HR Director for a mid-sized insurance company. They have multiple locations throughout the state and employ 320 people on average. She’s worked for a handful of companies over the years and has been with this company for the last 5 years.
In one of her past HR roles, she spent time recruiting for internal roles, but it isn’t what she loved to do. Since there aren’t enough people on her team, she’s tasked with handling a large amount of the HR responsibilities and doesn’t have a lot of time when there are numerous open positions to fill within the company. She’s never worked directly with a recruiting company and thinks they can be kind of expensive for what her company is looking for. Hallie tends to use LinkedIn and search engines on the internet to find the information she needs to solve the problems at hand.
Now with all that information on Hallie, we have a lot of different ways we can target Hallie to make sure our recruiting agency is the one she calls when she needs to find talent. On the next blog, we’ll discuss how we can target Hallie based on the information we know about her!
