As your business continues to grow and new team members need to be found, onboarded, and trained, you’ll probably find your recruitment team growing as well. After all, if you’re focused on helping your business thrive in the new year, you’re likely going to need new recruiters to help your human resources efforts thrive. AI and algorithms can only go so far; having properly trained recruiters is one of the best decisions you can make in terms of ensuring your employee base is rock solid.
Properly training your recruiters doesn’t just help you find new employees. It helps make the entire process more efficient. If your recruiters are better able to attract great talent, you won’t have to sit through as many interviews and conversations that don’t go anywhere. You’ll also find that you have far less employee turnover, because your recruiters were able to find employees that are truly a good fit for your company—they don’t just look good on paper. Investing in recruitment is a worthwhile practice, and can radically change your business for the better.
The process of training new recruiters has some things in common with training other positions. There are some basic foundational elements of your business that every employee needs to know. But recruiters do have some unique aspects that make training them slightly different. It’s a highly specialized job, and the onboarding process has a distinctive look and feel. A successful recruiter is essential when it comes to ensuring the success of your company, so their training isn’t something you should take lightly or go into without a plan.
With that in mind, here are a handful of hacks when it comes to training recruiters.
Provide a Recruitment Mentor
First and foremost, choose an experienced mentor on your team who can assist the new recruiter. Recruitment is something that’s difficult to learn in a classroom or in front of a computer; it’s really a skill you learn by witnessing and doing. By partnering someone more experienced with someone less experienced, they’ll be able to help each other succeed. Not only will the rookie pick up tips and tricks from the mentor, but the mentor will probably learn new technologies, practices, or ideas from the mentee as well. Furthermore, by fostering relationships within your company, you’ll see overall employee retention increase. The more people feel connected with their coworkers, the less likely they are to jump ship. Mentorship programs can also decrease the pressure on your human resources team to be the go-to people for questions.
Don’t Expect Too Much Too Early
It’s tempting to immediately set high goals and let your team run free. But since recruitment is such a specialized skill, you may need to start slower than you’re used to. Set goals that are realistic and attainable. When your new recruiters hit these early wins, the momentum from their victory will carry them forward to more success. Goals early on may look less like “bring in three new interview candidates” and more like “reach out to five potential talents a week”. Baby step goals can work wonders for someone’s psyche, making them much more productive overall. You can’t bring someone into a new industry and expect that they’ll instantly be immensely successful. You can always increase goals as time goes on, but know that early on, what they’ll be doing is mostly planting seeds and figuring out your systems.
Practice Active Listening Skills
Active listening is an essential part of recruitment. While you want everyone on your team to be a great listener, recruiters in particular need to be able to take in a large amount of information and process it quickly. Many people think they’re great listeners, but have never actually been trained in proper active listening. Active listening requires things like:
- Leaning forward slightly and demonstrating your attention with your body language
- Asking open-ended questions to encourage someone to continue speaking
- Refraining from interrupting or getting distracted
- Restating what someone says back to them using slightly different language in order to ensure you understood them properly
- Listening to hear, not necessarily to respond
Roleplay
Recruitment is a very active process. It’s something that requires the person performing it to be able to adapt to certain situations on a dime, respond to conversational cues, and tweak their process as needed. Sometimes roleplaying is the most effective way to practice those skills. Sit down your new recruiter and work through a variety of scenarios, throwing them some difficult curveballs to help coach them through how to respond. At the end of the day, you’re not going to be able to practice every single scenario. Recruitment takes place in the real world, and that isn’t always something you can be perfectly prepared for in an office. But by embracing the practice of roleplaying, you’ll be able to increase your recruiter’s confidence and help them workout that “adaptation” muscle. You can also use roleplaying when recruiting recruiters. By asking them to perform certain scenarios within the context of an interview, you’ll be able to evaluate how they’ll respond to potential talent and see how they perform in high-intensity conversations.
Commit to Continuous Education
Recruitment as an industry is ever-evolving. There will always be new systems, tools, processes, and ideas to explore. Recruiters should never feel as if they’ve mastered their industry or have nothing new to learn. Part of your recruitment budget should go towards training your recruiters. You could either organize something formal, like a team off-site, or give each team member a flexible budget that they can use on e-courses and conferences they might find helpful. You could also consider supplementing some of your employees’ continued education, in case recruiters want to receive a degree or certification from a university program. There’s a wide range of ways that you can support your employees’ continuous education, but it’s vital to do so. It demonstrates that your company is forward-thinking, cares about your employees’ success, and is willing to put your money where your mouth is when it comes to recruitment.
Claire Swinarski is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.
The post How to Train New Recruiters Effectively appeared first on HR Daily Advisor.