Are personas a little bit lazy? When more than likely your sales (recruitment teams) already know the people they want to target?

You’ve seen a persona. Looks like this.

Most personas are based on workshop discussions. Not data.

Which is fine. Personas have their place and can provide some direction, if you have none already, especially if you use external partners.

But in recruitment you can go deeper than personas, by utilising an ABM (account-based marketing approach) to get to the actual people to target, not just a top level and fluffy persona.

Recruiters are the best marketing people. Boom, cat out of the bag.

The best ones: identify the markets, identify their ideal client, communicate their message to them, to these lists defined by segmentation. Marketing 101.

Recruitment companies don’t need personas, as most will have multiple LISTS of these ideal clients on the CRM (or somewhere).

Then you can dig deeper and add to the list from previous clients, a key strategy of ABM – utilise the people / clients / companies who are already known to you, rather than / in addition to chasing the marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

You don’t need a persona workshop to start your marketing, you need solid conversations with sales to talk through your HIT LIST.

Otherwise, it will be disconnected and what you’ll get is a load of marketing leads (MQLs) that no one looks at, as it’s not within the recruiter’s ideal client profile (eg their lists).

ALL MARKETING EFFORTS TO GENERATE LEADS SHOULD BE FOCUSSED ON THIS HIT LIST

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is ABM 101.

Develop a list of people not a list of personas.