Marketing for Talent Acquisition: Ideal Candidate Avatar

Marketing isn’t just for getting new clients.

Hiring is more than just filling a role or getting a job done; it’s about building a high-performance team that grows your business. Building your team at work isn’t much different than building a sports team–each player has a specific role, is motivated by different things, and needs different types of coaching and support.

Finding those ideal candidates is also no different than finding ideal prospects for your business. You can use the same strategies used to market your business to build a talent acquisition strategy.

Ideal Candidate Avatar

A baseball coach doesn’t choose a first baseman based on skill or positional requirements alone.

Yes, they need to know how to catch a ball, but they will also need to work well with the team, fit into the team culture, and be invested in helping the team win. 

Before drafting your job description and posting it on LinkedIn, take some time to build an ideal candidate avatar. You’ll understand your ideal candidate on a deeper level and can craft a compelling job description that attracts those ideal candidates. 

Candidate Value Journey

Finding ideal candidates is tough, but it’s even more challenging when you don’t have a strategy.

Much like we build a customer value journey to understand where and how to market to our ideal customers, you can use the customer value journey to create your strategy for talent acquisition. 

Most businesses hire reactively, but the companies that succeed at building high-performance teams create a proactive talent acquisition strategy.

This allows them to attract and retain high-performing talent and build roles around those ideal candidates instead of filling positions as they become available. 

Are You Delegating Tasks or Growing a Team?

One of the most common pieces of advice given to new business owners is to delegate tasks they don’t love and aren’t great at to a virtual assistant. Now, that’s not always bad advice, but for most new business owners, this is done rapidly without much forethought into their future business structure and growth. We must ask ourselves, am I delegating tasks or growing a team?

If you are or plan to grow a team, the tasks themselves matter less than finding an ideal team member who can adapt to the needs of the business.

Let’s go back to our baseball analogy. If you’re a one-person team, you may be better off finding a decent player invested in learning and growing into a position over time than you are finding a home-run hitter who can’t catch or throw and has no desire to learn or grow with your team. 

Instead of focusing solely on the tasks, you want to delegate, spend time considering your ideal future organizational structure and the types of team members you want to bring in and build the company around.

As they say, find the right people first, and you can eventually get them into the right position or create one for them. 

Growing a team is no easy task, but attracting ideal candidates is no different than marketing to prospective clients. Build brand awareness, engage, and qualify candidates, and select the right people to grow your business and accomplish your missing instead of building perfect roles that no one cares about.