What’s The Point of Recruitment Training?
What is the point of recruitment training?…….. I mean what do you really want from it?
Most peope think that all recruiters want is money. Whilst money is a motivator, in my experience I find recruiters are as keen about learning new skills and applying them as earning a bonus.
The good news is that they are not mutually exclusive.
There are however a few things to bear in mind when you think about what training is best for you?
1. People in Learning and Development don’t agree on how we learn.
2. Learning is not a science.
3. Most of what you read about how people learn, is opinion. Even though it’s often presented as fact.
Keep that in mind.
So back to the original question.
What do you want from recruitment training? or Why are you investing in training your people?
There are many benefits from training your people – better engagement, higher professional standards, consistency, culture etc. But the primary reason for training anybody at work is to improve performance. I would go a little further and add that the purpose of recruitment training, is to improve performance as efficiently and sustainably as possible.
How do we learn?
There are hundreds of theories about learning, some are more right than others. Many are completely false – I’m looking at you learning styles! They are all just theories, and they are all disputed at some level. Alex and I have come to realise that there are three or four things that need to happen for training to be effective. We’ve come up with a simple way to explain this, based on what we’ve learned in over 25 years working in training.
We call it ICE and it’s the basis of all of our training..
Ideas
We start with a new idea. We introduce a new way of doing something. This might be reading an article or blog post, watching a video, participating in a webinar, or listening to a podcast.
Context
Interpreting the ideas so they make sense in your world. How could that work in my job? What do I know about that already? Why will/won’t that work for me? It’s about asking questions, sharing experiences and making mental connections.
Execution
Putting contextualised ideas into action. We help people do this by giving them tools that remind them or guide them through a process. We give people challenges to try in the real world and scenarios to practice before
This process is not always linear. You may have to go back and forth between Context and Execution to refine how the Idea will work for you.
Reflection is Key
The glue between all of these steps is reflection. You have to take time to think about what you do, how new ideas can help and how you might re-purpose them to fit. The most effective learners are very self-aware, they challenge and monitor themselves throughout the process and ask for feedback and support when they need it. Matt Charney from Recruiting Daily talks about a similar mindset of Learning Agility in his excellent post.
If you’re curious about how we do all this online, why not join us for a quick demo on our platform, or sign up get 7 days to explore our learning community?
