In addition to sharing the Expert Persona insights, I conducted activation workshops with teams to help them better understand the personas and apply them to real-world use cases. One such activation session was conducted in partnership with our HR team to recruit new appliance repair technicians.
Problem statement: HR is struggling to source and hire high-quality appliance repair technicians.
Goal: The workshop had two primary goals. The first was to immerse the HR team in the expert personas and help them gain a deep understanding of the internal drivers that make up each persona. The second goal was to align HR around one specific persona and begin building hiring materials tailored to that persona.
Plan: The first step was to spend a solid hour introducing the personas to HR. This allowed me to bring an employee perspective to HR in a way that would help them build empathy for their experiences and choose the right candidates to target.
For step two, I split the larger group into three working groups and assigned each one a persona. Then, I asked the teams to read through the current job description and highlight terms/phrases in green that would resonate with that persona, and in red for the ones that would not resonate and explain why.
After concluding the exercise, we convened the larger team to delve into the reasoning behind their decisions. Following a thoughtful discussion, we collectively settled on "The Altruist" as the focal persona for our job description.
Subsequently, we dedicated the rest of our time to generating straightforward, yet compelling terms and phrases aimed at resonating with and attracting The Altruist to the role.
After the HR team published the new job description, they saw a 41% increase in the overall number of applicants.