Using Personas in Human Capital Management: A Novel Concept Affected by Legal, Ethical and Technological Considerations

Abstract

Nowadays, Human Capital Management (HCM) is seen as a service whose consumers are current and potential future employees. Some trends pushing the HCM operations to new approaches are the rise of individualization and flexible work as well as the changing expectations and values that new generations X and Y bring to the way people management is evolving. Companies need new tools and approaches along the lifecycle of their employee relations – from applicant pool construction and maintenance to recruitment and training. In SME companies the management is likely to address HCM needs on a very individual level. However, larger companies need to categorize their human capital into certain entities to mass-customize their HCM services. This paper explores the proponents and challenges in the usability of the Persona concept for HCM. Persona is a service design approach widely applied in marketing, and a few research papers have argued that personas may have a role in improved people-oriented HCM. Personas – as commonly used in the sphere of marketing - aim to create a limited set of archetypes that differ from each other. Whereas the traditional customer and employee clustering methods leaned heavily on demographics (age, experience, job title, etc.), the persona concept adds psychographic elements like values, and social engagement to form the basis of service development and delivery. The contents of personas are often a mix of real-life data-backed facts of people existing and some imaginary attributes. Different personas will likely request different services to feel fully motivated and supported. This paper studies the awareness of personas among HCM experts across industries and countries as well as the ideas for personas in HCM by marketing professional more used with the use of personas in their profession. The qualitative study based on twelve semi-structured individual interviews was conducted in November-December 2022. The results indicate that the HCM community knows about the persona concept and early adoptions or plans for implementation are ongoing. However, the current usage of personas is mainly focused on employer branding and recruitment (the most marketing-type of HCM actions), and only in a few cases does the usage cover the spectrum of internal HCM processes. The study also revealed some limitations for HCM that are not present in the marketing field. Demands for transparency, equality, data privacy, and personal integrity set challenges in clustering the workforce. The novel technical solutions such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) in persona creation offer efficiency and a deeper analytical foundation in persona development but also bring in new questions of transparency and ethicality of their use. The results indicate the further need for research on best practices of creating and using Personas in a way that ethically and legally serves the interests of both the company and the employee.