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UNBOXED – A more inclusive approach to talent attraction [video]

Watch our UNBOXED event on how to create candidate personas that are inclusive and better reflect your employer brand. 

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ThirtyThree

As part of UNBOXED – the inclusive employer branding series, ThirtyThree’s Strategy & Solutions expert Marcus Body hosted a session exploring the traditional use of candidate personas in talent attraction and the risks they pose to diversity and inclusion. He presented an alternative approach that is more inclusive and will revolutionise your recruitment process.

Transcript

Amanda Faull  00:05 

Hello, and welcome to unboxed 30. Threes inclusive employer branding series. I'm Amanda Faull the D&I Communications Specialist here at 33. And your host for today. I see some of you are still joining if you're new to unboxed this is where we bring together leading experts from across D&I talent and employer branding, to discuss ideas and solutions for making our industry's approach more inclusive to all. Then we take what we've discussed today, some of the ideas you hear, and we turn those into white papers and guides, which we share freely on our website, to our audience, and anyone who's interested. We have had a few events and guides published already. And you can find all of those hosted on 33’s Insights page, which we will share in the chat now.  

So, what are we discussing today, as you can see from the slide, we're talking about candidate personas, and I'm delighted to be joined by my colleague, Marcus Body, who has worked for nearly 20 years and employer branding. And it's safe to say he has a solid view of how the industry has changed, and what more needs to be done to keep up with the times. He's also cohost of our new podcast, The Brand Plan, which you can listen to after today's session on all major podcast platforms. We've just shared a link in the chat. But please don't go anywhere. We've got Marcus joining me shortly. Just to give you a very quick overview of how today is going to work. Marcus is going to join he's got a presentation he's going to walk you through, I believe there's a poll question. So, keep an eye out for that. And then he'll come back. And we'll have a Q&A, where you will also have an opportunity to post questions. And then we're going to wrap up at 3:30. On the dot. You'll see there's a chat. So, feel free to start using that I will open up the Q&A shortly. And the Q&A is a little bit different. You can post questions anonymously if you don't want anybody to know who you are. And the rest of the audience can see your questions, and they can also vote on them. So, we'll open that up very soon. So that's enough of me taking up Marcus's time. Let me just bring him on. 

Marcus Body  02:27 

Hi, everyone. Lovely to see people managed to make it to the session today. 

Amanda Faull  02:31 

Thanks for joining us, Marcus. So, I've already explained what the session is, I know you'll be presenting, I'm going to encourage people to be interactive, as we've got a Q&A, but we've got people joining from the US. So we've got people in the UK. If you want to use the chat, tell us where you are, where you're tuning in from, we'd love to hear. And again, if you've got any questions, maybe from your geography, we'd love to hear them. But I'm going to shut up now. And hand over to you, Marcus, and then I'll see everybody again shortly. Thank you. 

Marcus Body  03:06 

Thanks, Amanda. Right, I'm gonna try and make the magic work and share my screen. So what I wanted to talk to all of you about today is something that has been bugging me for years. And I think it's something that I started out feeling a little bit uncomfortable about. And then over the years, I've come to realize, I think there really is a problem here that not enough people are thinking about. And that's about the way that we tend to use candidate personas in a very similar way to the way consumer advertising uses personas. I think there are all sorts of reasons why that isn't a good idea when it comes to employer branding. But I want to talk to you a little bit about why that is and what I think we could do that might be a bit better. So, we're going to talk for about the next 10-15 minutes. But do by all means start thinking about what questions you've got about this. So how it normally works. I appreciate everybody does this slightly differently. But a very common approach to personas is to start by thinking of a person and that that person is created to help us empathize with an audience. So it's really understandable human reason will create a human being we can start thinking about and empathizing with an understanding. What we then do is then think about, okay, what is that person's wants, needs pain points and barriers. And then it's used, of course, to create messaging and channel plans. And right, this is what we're going to say. And this is where we're going to say, and this is relatively common practice within the world of consumer advertising. But even within the world of consumer advertising, you find some debate around how useful some of these personas really are. I found a wonderful quote from someone in the world of consumer marketing who said, look, a poorly constructed persona can seem a lot like a stereotype. I'm going to go a little bit further than that persona. I'm going to say most personas I have seen are essentially stereotypes. And that's not such a huge problem in the consumer world. But it's a massive problem once we get into recruitment for reasons that I think, if they're not obvious to you already, hopefully I will make very clear shortly, and just kind of start you thinking about it, I'm going to invent a company and I'm going to invent a company that sells hands open scented candles, unfortunately, I'm not allowed to call it The Body Shop for legal reasons. So I've called it the Marcus market shop. If you think about what I can and should do is absolutely fine. If I've decided that I want to sell hand soap and scented candles for me to identify who the most likely audiences to do this. And if you look at the kind of profiles used by organizations in this kind of space, they'll go, Okay, we're gonna target 20 to 55 year old women, middle to upper class, that's the people with the money to buy what we want them to do. But it's always about finding the people most likely to buy your product or your service. And then, and then starting to think about how you can tackle them as a group. And that's kind of okay, when you're thinking about what kind of customers you're going to target. But if you did the same thing with employees that will cause you all sorts of problems to get, we'll we’re just going to advertise towards the people most likely to work for us. And actually, you know, you could very easily end up with a very monocultural and very and diverse workforce. So, your key employee profile has to be a bit more complex than that. Unfortunately, I think what we tend to do is quite often construct employer brand personas that are far too close to those consumer personas. Give you an example. Let's imagine that I was thinking of hiring IT professionals and I started constructing one of these traditional style personas for who we're going to target. And I might look at a pile of data about people who work in it and start constructing a persona that fits that and I'll go okay, well, I'm gonna call him Nigel. And I'm going to say he's 43. And I'm going to say he lives in Kidderminster, and I'm going to say he's married and has two children. He reads The Guardian online, he enjoys skiing, and is a member of the National Trust, has a Facebook account, looks for jobs using LinkedIn, and has a degree in computer science. And you'll see an awful lot of personas that start to look a little bit like this. Now, there's an obvious problem, which hopefully some of you are screaming at the screen right now going, you can't do that because why on earth have you decided that it needs to be male? As soon as we call it, Nigel, we said the person that we're hiring, the person we're thinking of is male, we've got a male settler, we've also said has to have a degree in computer science for no particularly good reason, loads of people working in it who don't have degrees in computer science. But as soon as we specify that thing, we start to make our persona accidentally male because most people who have computer science degrees are male. Okay, well, let's have another go. Let's see if we can do any better with our IT persona. So instead of Nigel, let's let's improve Nigel to Nigella. So, Nigella is 43 and lives in Kidderminster and is married and has two children and reads the Guardian online, enjoy skiing, and is a member of the National Trust has a Facebook account looks for jobs using LinkedIn, and has a degree. Okay, this looks a lot better, doesn't it? Well, no, it doesn't really and hopefully, some, some of you are still screaming at the screen. Because for some reason, I've decided that my ideal recruit is statistically white and middle class because they're called Nigella. They enjoy skiing. And remember the National Trust they read guardian, there's no particularly good reason why I have made things this way. But it's going to skew everything I do, as soon as I start doing them. Now you can keep on going and chipping away at this. And those of you who've been around for a long time in this industry will have done projects where you go right Can we come up with a name to call it that is neither male nor female, something like Joe which could apply to either gender. The problem is, as soon as you remove everything that specifies anything that could be discriminatory, you end up with a profile that looks like this, we have a profile that has a name is has an age lives in the UK has a partner or doesn't uses the Internet has hobbies. Okay, this is now nondiscriminatory. But this is also now completely useless. And it's a complete waste of time to kind of start trying to create one of these because it's no longer helpful. It doesn't give you enough direction. And this is the dilemma at the heart of all of this is for any job or for any group of jobs that you look at, you're going to end up making a decision. And one thing you might do is you're going to use the data in which case you are going to end up defining the majority stereotype. If most of the employees in this category are male, you're going to end up with a male persona. Alternatively, you can end up with something that is Ed and AI driven, where you say, right, we're going to codify all the minority groups within this particular role. But then all you end up with is a different stereotype, you end up with a minority stereotype. And however hard you try, you will miss a characteristic or accidentally add in a characteristic that you didn't really intend to, but the consequences of it can be quite severe. I want to talk to you about those risks because I think they're really serious and not a lot of people think about them hard enough. So first and foremost, let's start with morality. And you cannot have an inclusive stereotype. As soon as you start specifying things you are you are starting to exclude people as soon as you give it this characteristic, you're excluding everyone who doesn't have that characteristic. I think there's also a really important point here about offending people is, if I create a stereotype for recruiting into a role, I might well offend everyone who who already does that role for me who doesn't fit that stereotype. Or indeed, actually, you can end up offending people who do fit that stereotype if it feels like you've done something kind of crass and lazy there. So I think there's a huge risk of accidentally upsetting people when you do this. Second problem, however, it certainly for those of you in the UK market is a legal one. So under UK employment law, you're in severe danger of indirect discrimination by age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage, or civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. Unless you can show that your personas are proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, you are in severe danger of being in breach of that of that legal requirement not to discriminate even indirectly, against any of those criteria. And I think I've seen an awful lot of personas that are skirting very close to that line, if not going right over it. Last but not least, however, there's a very practical point here is you're going to inadvertently exclude people who could be great hires because they didn't conform to a stereotype. And that isn't a good idea. And that's never been a good idea. So that's kind of what I think's wrong. The question, therefore has to be what what do we do instead? Is there a way of starting to think of our audience, and I think there is, I think there's a better way of starting to think about the people who might come and work for us. So, if the old approach was like this, we're going to create a persona to help us empathize, use that to create one's needs pain points, barriers, and then use that to create messaging and channel plans. What about if instead, we started by identifying our strengths and thinking about the kinds of audiences who might want those, and instead, we're defining things by attitude. And by mindset, then we can expand on the wants, needs, pain points and barriers, and use that to create messaging and channel plans. To show you what I mean, I'm going to give you a couple of examples. So, you could start to define personas like this, you could say, right? There are a bunch of people out there who are looking to acquire skills, qualifications, and experience in a particular profession, that is a mindset that they have. And they might well as per our old personas have that attitude, because they're an apprentice or graduate. And that's very often where people were creating these kinds of things. But they really don't have to be that mindset can be shared by people in very different situations. That could, for example, be the mindset of someone starting again, mid-career, that could be the mindset of someone returning to work after a period out of the workplace. That could be the mindset of someone who's recently immigrated to the UK, and perhaps has qualifications that aren't recognized here. And so they need to re qualify. Actually, because we've defined this by mindset, we can start to think about lots of different types of people who might fit within that, who might be all sorts of different ages, genders and backgrounds, and socio-economic groups. The point is, whoever they are, we need to focus content on what they can learn here. And there's a bunch of stuff we can say to people who fit this mindset, regardless of some of their demographic data. Let's look at another one. So what about someone who's sleek, seeking flexible working and respectful work life balance within a particular industry, and very often, I've seen one of these created under the old school percenters, but that would be the one that was labeled the new parent. But actually, it doesn't have to be if we think about the kinds of people who might have that mindset, it's going to be far wider than that. It could be somebody who has caring responsibilities, it could be someone who's just got a side hustle. And the job is is a means to an end while they're doing something else. They also want that flexible working and work life balance. It can be someone who just likes to relax equally, there are people out there who have none of those things and are still looking for this within a particular industry. The point is, again, whoever they are, we can tell them stories of people who succeed here without giving up on a life outside of work. So, we don't need to know what age they are. We don't need to give them a name. And we don't need to know if they live in Kidderminster. So, let's have a look at some more of these because I think the more of them you see, the more you start to get the feel of what I'm suggesting here. So you could say, Right, let's create a persona of someone who's looking to inject more variety or challenge into their work at a bigger employer, if you are one of the bigger employers in that sector, where you could go, what about we might have something to say to people looking for a more purposeful and rewarding use for their skill set, we might have something to say someone looking for a more collaborative and team based work environment. And we might have something to say for someone looking for more personal impact and recognition. These are all mindsets and attitudes that you could decide, right? That's a that's a way of thinking that we want to tune into where we think we've got something to say. Actually, the good thing about these kinds of personas is the content creation becomes incredibly easy because you've defined them by how they feel and their attitude. It becomes immediately obvious what sorts of things you might want to show them. So that first one about someone looking For more variety and challenge, you might go right well, okay, we need to show that person some very creative case studies existing staff talking about a portfolio of experience, not just the last thing they did. For someone looking for more purposeful and rewarding use for their skill set, it might be about showing existing staff talking about projects they found fulfilling, or indeed the views and thanks for those they've impacted whether that's customers or patients or end users, depending on what industry you're in. For someone looking for a more collaborative and team-based environment, okay, that person needs to see group case studies, they need to see information about our employee resource groups or other similar networks. Team video softer social content is going to be what what convinces this person and for some are looking for more personal impact and recognition, it can be just as simple as putting a spotlight on staff who you're already able to show are able to do that, because they made a personal impact because they're speaking at a conference or something similar like that. So I think there are a few good places to start, if you do want to go down the line of creating these kinds of personas, this is where I would advise you to begin is first and foremost, if you've have an EVP that you have some confidence in, have a look at it and have a look at the promises contained within it. And they might be called the pillars, they might be called the themes, it depends on how you construct it, and start thinking through really hard, what kinds of people might those promises appeal to? So rather than starting with these other jobs, we need to fill start with that, who are the who are the mindsets that we have something worth saying to? You might want to look at what employers you're good at taking talent from and considering why that is you might go actually we're getting a lot of our talent from bigger employers. So there's a mindset there are people looking for a smaller place, let's get into why that is. Or alternatively, it might be the other way around, you might be a bigger employee who's very good at taking people from smaller places. Again, that's the mindset you want to tune into is why are people making that move? Again, regardless of what age they are, regardless of what gender they are, or whether or not they read the guardian. And you might look at what's attracting early talent to your organization, you might look at when talent acquisition talk directly to potential hires, one of the questions they get asked, Where does that conversation go? And one of the things that people are interested in, you might look at what did new starters say they like most versus previous employers, you might look at when someone joins you from a direct competitor, what's the typical reason why they've made that move. But equally you might want to look at when people don't join from outside the industry, what has brought them your way. But again, what you're aiming to do here is not work out what percentage of them fit any particular demographic criteria. Instead, you're aiming to understand what are the different mindsets that bring people into our into our orbit? And that we have something to say to them? And how could we get better at doing that. So that's a very fast version of what I think the problem is, and what I think a better way of doing things are, but I want to kind of open it up to everyone in the session by we're going to start with a bit of a poll, which Amanda is going to open up in a minute. But essentially, you know, I want to ask you which personas you think would actually be more helpful. And I'm perfectly happy to be voted down if you disagree with me. But you know, let's say persona type one is 90 days, 43 years and Kidderminster married with two kids enjoy skiing is a member of the National Trust. And persona, type two might be a person of any gender and ethnicity and, indeed, domicile who works for one of our competitors, but will prefer all kinds of projects if we could show them those. And I want to ask you as a group to have a stop and have a think about which kind of persona do you think is the right way to go? Is it defining the demographic data? Or is it defining the attitudes they might have towards you? So thanks very much for listening to that. I'm going to stop screen sharing now. And we're going to go into a bit of a discussion. 

Amanda Faull  18:56 

I'm back not just a blank persona. So thank you, Marcus. We've already had a question coming in. So some things are resonating. But yes, thanks, everybody. For starting to vote. I'm just going to remind you of the question. If you can't find it, it should be beneath the chat. They should see there's a Q&A as well as an area where you can vote. I'm going to hide that now. Marcus and I will check back in on when I close the poll and see what your views are Marcus. I've got a few questions that I'd like to ask based on what you've just talked about. And then as I said, if anybody wants to throw some out to us. Yeah. Great to see what you're thinking. You. You gave some really helpful examples of what a mindset persona could be how you could get started with mapping these against your EVP, for example, or what people are saying, but I know a lot of people who are tuning in our from large, complex organizations who have early Talent Recruitment, they have experienced hires as well as more niche roles. And I was just the first thing I thought of when you talked about this is, how do you cover all the bases without creating too many personas? Because somebody sitting down and going, we need about 100 of these to cover everything we do, or Yeah, well, where would you start with that? 

Marcus Body  20:24 

Completely. So, I think the way to do this really well is rather than thinking about right, so I need to do a bunch of mindsets for it and a bunch of mindsets for procurement and a bunch of mindsets for the grant program and a bunch of mindsets for this. Instead, start thinking about right holistically across all the organizational departments, there are probably a relatively finite number of reasons that people are going to come towards us. And you can probably set up you know, between when we've done this in the past with other employees, it's turned out to be maybe five or six personality, attitudes that are bringing people towards that organization. And then you can start getting right, when I look at early talent, are we getting all of those? Or is it particularly focused on a few of those? When I look at it, is it all of those? Or is it particularly focused on a few of those in the same with head office versus perhaps for some of you, it'll be different locations, different stores, you don't need to start again, each time, what you might want to do is build a suite of personas that apply in different-to-different extents to those different categories later on. The advantage of doing this is, then you've got something that you can use to do some proper brand advertising, rather than recruitment marketing, because now you've got an understanding of here are some mindsets that we need to appeal to out there, rather than starting each individual recruitment campaign from scratch from zero. So, I think that's how I'd advise that you go about it. But yeah, I mean, it's it is always slightly more complex in a big organization, and particularly if you span different countries and different continents, it can be more challenging. But nevertheless, you will find that there is overlap between the personality types within those different places, it might just be in different weights. 

Amanda Faull  22:13 

Yeah. And I think just, it might be helpful to think about how, how you might apply this. So, like bringing it to life? Because, you know, I think we talk a lot about storytelling. And when you're using employees, and obviously how you're communicating about your organization, it would be interesting to hear if you've got any examples of how you've then turned those into an employer brand campaign. Have you worked with any clients with this new method? And yeah, how that how that approach has changed the way we're thinking about the storytelling for that brand. 

Marcus Body  22:52 

Absolutely. So, I think, yeah, we are already doing this with some clients and starting to break down their audience into how do they feel about this organization, and what is the attitude they have towards it, and what is the thing that might attract them towards them. And as they say, for that content creation piece, it actually makes life a lot easier, because we now understand what we might want to say to those audiences. So even within we're doing some work with a client at the moment where we've broken down their, their graduate audience this way. And rather than doing what often happens of saying, right, let's think of the STEM students and the non-STEM students, or let's think of the Russell Group students and the non-Russell Group students, which I know that's a nonsense, there will be some Russell Group STEM students who have the same attitude as non-STEM, non-Russell Group students, they are united in feeling this way about you, we will have a way to talk to those types of people. Whereas you know, people again, from both of those categories might have this attitude towards you, or this attitude towards you. And we need to be able to serve those different mindsets and give them the content that they want. Rather than assuming that everyone who happens to be in one demographic bucket feels the same way. Because they don't 

Amanda Faull  24:04 

imagine an impassioned story when somebody is talking not just about can you tell us about your experience of working here? It's a particular thing that when you've brought, you know, if you're obviously selecting who you're going to be interviewing or featuring, you know, what you're asking them, and they're plentily variants, and I imagine, yeah, 

Marcus Body  24:27 

you're now saying to that employee, hey, we'd love you to tell a story all about your very portfolio of work, rather than, hey, we'd like you to tell us your story because you're male and live in Kidderminster and therefore, you fitted that persona, which, you know, again, back to that point that you can really offend that employee who you want to tell their story. If you say, Oh, we're only interested in your story, because you've fit these demographic criteria. That's quite offensive to them, and they can get rightly very annoyed by it. Whereas if you're saying, Actually, your story is a great example of this kind of experience with they'll use to talk about that kind of experience, that tends to go a lot better with them as well. 

Amanda Faull  25:04 

I like how you've just brought in, you know, when we think about single-minded, we need to have this kind of person and this person and the to look like a certain way, you're immediately narrowing and still falling back into that original trap, even if you don't have a persona named. So the Q&A is going wild. So I'm getting more questions because I want to end and I'm going to quickly show the poll. I know it was very simple one but 

Amanda Faull  25:33 

Maybe it's a Nigel who's voted for Nigel. Nigel from Kidderminster is here. So yeah, resoundingly it looks like people are with you on this new approach. So, I don't know where to begin, we might have to, we'll have to pick these up markets you might have answering all of these. But I'll start with the first one. And saying I really liked this approach, especially when it comes to defining the type of content we need. Great. How can we use this to make some decisions on the channels we need to use? 

Marcus Body  26:03 

Sure. So, I think this is where things get interesting is, you know, if you think so if we if we set aside job advertising for a second. So you know, I have a job for a finance manager that I need to place in places that that can be found LinkedIn jobs, perhaps there's the employer branding, end of things where you need to work out, right, what is our plan to get in front of me, what I'm saying is that actually, we are going to use things like for example, LinkedIn to say, right, let's create some content for people who feel this way, some content for people to use that way, have some content for people who feel this way. And you can push that all out through the same channel. But it will be noticed by the people who have that emotion who tuned into that idea. And they might well scroll past the ones that aren't aimed at them. But that's okay. It gives you kind of gives you a way to use that channel in a way that can appeal to more than one different type of one different type of person, you could end up doing some specific channel activities that are geared towards the kind of mindset that you have defined. So, for example, the ones I used earlier, if you took the person who's looking for qualifications and learning and development, okay, we can start to think about the kind of content that person is likely to be consuming online or the kinds of places they might be going. You can certainly do things with your programmatic advertising that can target people looking for that kind of content. So, there's definitely stuff you can do around channels. I think the overwhelming thing about some of the old school personas is they're not actually terribly useful for channel planning and they can lead you to do some crazy things they can lead you to end up advertising in this place because your stereotype went skiing so we're going to advertise invalid as air and it's bonkers as soon as you go Yeah, but we need an IT manager in in Kidderminster. What on earth are we doing advertising our ski slope invalided? But it kind of made sense, because you had a persona that said that they went skating was obviously the more sensible thing to be doing is advertising. Where the actual roles are, I think it's where the consumer approach can lead you to do some crazy stuff. If you don't stop and go, wait a minute, what am I accidentally doing here? Who am I accidentally targeting? Have I just inadvertently discriminated in terms of who I'm exposing this job to? And I think with the mindsets, that's a far smaller risk that you're going to do that. 

Amanda Faull  28:20 

I'm looking at the time, I don't know if we go a little bit over, but people can drop off. But I'd love to get to some of these questions. And then we will wrap up and get to them possibly in a in a blog for you. Someone's asked if you look at what's attracting your early talent, or what's already in your EVP. Do you not risk? Continued bias? 

Marcus Body  28:42 

Yeah, I think it's the fact that it depends how your EVP has been constructed. But yeah, absolutely. If you have created an EVP around the people you have hired in the past, and that's not a very diverse group, then absolutely. That's a severe risk. Hopefully your EVP isn't constructed that way, if your EVP is constructed that way, then you do need to go and do something about that first. But yeah, I think that's undoubtedly the case at some organizations is they have a definition of success based on who succeeded in the past. And that might not be valid, really, that's just on based on who they happen to hire and who had, you know, structural advantages in the past. So, I think that it's a perfectly legit objection. But I would say that is to the EVP model rather than to this persona approach. 

Amanda Faull  29:25 

That was one of the questions I thought of, you know, when you first talked about the session was, like, oh, how often do you refresh and EVP how often do you refresh minds? I think that goes back to that point, you know, are these fixed for ever or, you know, I'm sure EVPs could evolve. So, you would think these would evolve? I'm going to, should I go for one more? If you're focusing on a mindset and not a particular demographic, how do you test content and ideas and know if they've been successful? I'm wondering if so, the question there is probably you want to improve diversity. And now you're not focusing on diversity, but you're focusing on mindset. How do you test with, I guess, the audience you're trying to attract? 

Marcus Body  30:12 

So, I think there are a number of really good questions. By the way, there's a number of ways you can do it. I mean, always my instinct, because I like doing this sort of thing is live testing is actually running stuff and seeing whether it's working. If you want to pretest stuff before you launch it, to see how well that content works, you can use switching mechanisms within any basic survey tool, like Survey Monkey, you have someone into the survey, you can ask them some questions, rather than asking them the normal demographic questions of how old are you? And what gender? Are you and all those things that we used to ask me? Don't ask them? What do you look for most in an employer, and then pivot the survey based off those questions, show them the content that is relevant to the answer they just gave you. And ask them how they feel about it. And then maybe show them some of the content that isn't aimed towards that thing and check that, you know, that isn't as effective with them as the one that is supposed to be effective with them. So you can definitely do stuff there to create a testing mechanism to, you know, evaluate people on the way in as to what is their key interest, and then show them stuff that you have developed there. But as I say, one of the with the best proof is always actually live stuff, try it, publish it, iterate it, see what's getting looks and likes, and then optimize to, you know, to understand, right? This is actually bringing you this video that we have created about the variety that you can have during your career here. Two people watch it all the way to the end. And if they don't, right, we know that people were interested enough to click into this thing, but not interested enough in what we're saying to make it to the end of it, that will give us a fair indication that we were not doing. 

Amanda Faull  31:42 

You know, that's, that's an important one about, you know, if you do any of these things, you need to have some metrics in place of understanding, you know, what's working and what's not. And I don't want to go too much more over. So, I think we should wrap it up there. I said, we've got a few questions. But what I think we should do is take these Marcus and on our Insights page, do a post and also, I mentioned at the start to everyone, after this event in a few weeks’ time, we'll be publishing a white paper based on this. So, I think that's actually a good opportunity for you, Marcus to answer some of those questions. So, I just want to thank you for putting this together talking us through this idea, which again, as you said, we're doing with some clients, but it's not widespread from our understanding. And I'd love to hear there's a few people who are kind of asking about, you know, I mean, it's still something we're shaping. So, I think there's a lot of still to be learned. But just to wrap up, everyone, thanks again, this has been recorded. I'll be sharing it shortly after this event. If you missed anything, if you want to connect with Marcus, he's on LinkedIn. He's very active. If you want to carry on the conversation, if you want to hear more from Marcus, I mentioned, he's got a podcast. So, The Brand Plan, the link is in the chat. And that's a wrap for all of us. So, hope everyone has a good rest of your afternoon. And we'll see you at the next event. Thank you. Thanks very much, everyone. 


While personas can be helpful, it's crucial to be aware of the potential discrimination they may create. If your personas include specific names, genders, social classes, or ethnicities, you run the risk of unintentionally excluding qualified applicants who don't align with those assumptions.  

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  • Embracing new possibilities in talent attraction that will revolutionise your recruitment process 

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