The Persona Project Putting Personal Identity Front and Centre

The Persona Project Putting Personal Identity Front and Centre Sponsored by Jobbio:  Jane Reddin, Talent Advisor at Balderton Capital, has extensive experience working with startups and high growth companies to help them scale their businesses by building high-performing teams. Among her pioneering talent strategies is a toolkit which helps companies transform their ability to hire and develop top talent. Her latest project, powered by Jobbio, looks at how a candidate’s personal motivations and drivers affect their potential performance and their overall happiness at work. The premise is this: If a person can be in a role which enables them to be the best version of themselves ie their best whole selves; they are thriving, they stay at their company for a long time, their motivation, and therefore performance, is sky high. Create a strong overlap between company interests and personal interests,  and bingo, you’ve got mission alignment. So, how do we go about working out what those reasons are and then using them to build a compelling employer brand and EVP, which is both flexible enough to make space for individuality and yet still scalable at an organisational level? Building a flexible yet scalable employer brand We already know that today’s talent, particularly Millennials and Generation Z, are looking for more than the traditional, structured 9-5. This is the way we do it here seems to be an unattractive message to the new wave of talent who are motivated to be their “authentic selves” and bring more of their own identity into their working life. Among the many characteristics of their persona types, this generation are looking for a deeper connection to the purpose, the possibility to learn and grow, they want to work with people they connect with, plus the opportunity to pursue their passions and make a significant impact and a positive difference to the world. Startups who can create a flexible and agile culture, EVP and incentive and reward scheme are becoming increasingly more competitive when it comes to peeling talent away from larger corporates. However, creating a bespoke working code allowing each person to dictate their own payback on an individual basis is unsustainable at any sort of scale. There is another way! It is abundantly clear to Jane that a clear, authentic, oft-repeated message which articulates the purpose the why is a vital factor in galvanising a team. People who know what summit to aim for and why, primed with start-up DNA and a desire to make a positive difference to the world, achieve extraordinary feats on a weekly basis. Without this overarching goal, people get busy doing all sorts of things which won’t get the company up the mountain. She has also noticed that teams who are thriving often use the same words to describe why they are there and what motivates them the most. Connected networks, galvanised by a shared purpose, which operate as teams of teams containing diversified but clustered persona types, all focused on achieving an overarching mission, but each empowered to get something unique out of the experience. Attractive, agile and scalable. All this has got her thinking; Is it possible to codify persona types? Are there patterns and correlations, if we collect enough data, which can give us, as employers and hiring leaders, a good chance of appealing to multiple motivating factors so that our highly coveted potential hires simply can’t ignore the fired up feeling they get when they hear about an opportunity at our company? The Persona Project is born.  For this experiment to be a success, she needs your help. She wants to know what turns you on and what turns you off at work. Click the link to contribute.