How to Improve Low Recruitment Effectiveness With a Learning Management System

New hires go through a sort of funnel when they enter a company. Each stage of this funnel affects a number of important outcomes: whether a person stays in the company, whether their work performance is satisfactory, how long it took them to get there, etc.

The more filters your recruitment funnel has, and the better you organize each stage of recruitment, the better outcome you will get in the end – best-fitting candidates who intend to stay long term and start investing in the company right away. That’s where a learning management system (LMS) comes into play. It’s an online training platform that helps you improve your current recruitment stages, like entering tests and onboarding programs and also adds some more stages for greater precision.

Business executives measure recruiters’ productivity by the two most essential values: the number of new hires and the quality of recruitment. Even if you check  “fine” for one of them, your rates might be mediocre or worse. The reason for that lies not in your professional skills – otherwise, you could just develop them – but in things beyond them, such as business processes, company recruitment strategies and even the knowledge and skills of your colleagues. In short, it involves everything that affects the hiring process.

Let’s dive deeper into the most popular reasons for low recruitment effectiveness and efficiency, and exactly how an LMS helps to fix them.

Chaos In Your Company

According to the PwS Future of Recruiting survey, 49% of candidates decline a job offer because of a poor recruitment experience. This experience includes many factors, but most of them are connected with how organized the hiring process is.

For example, one of the most discouraging things for a new hire is a lack of help and guidance. In many companies, a department manager supervises and onboards new employees by themselves. However, since they’re busy with their essential tasks and duties, prospective employees are often left on their own and don’t know what they’re supposed to do, who to contact, etc.

How to Fix This With a Learning Management System

A training platform lets you streamline the onboarding process without involving other employees. All you need to do is collect all useful resources for the new workforce, upload them to your LMS and set the needed parameters. Then, your platform will automatically assign these courses to new hires and provide you with reports on their progress.

Of course, employees will still need to get in touch with their supervisors from time to time, but only for truly important issues. New hires will see from the very first days that it is a well-organized company where they won’t have to waste time and energy on basic issues – and so, they’ll be reluctant to leave your organization for some other place that could turn out to be chaotic.

New Hires Aren’t Prepared to Complete Needed Tasks Right Away

When a person starts a new job, they expect and are expected to get to their duties as soon as possible. However, in reality, the adaptation period takes quite a while. For instance, employees spend lots of time learning about the company’s mission, culture and other essentials – not to mention how long it takes them to get on their feet in their new role.

As a result, new hires may think they don’t quite fit in at the company, and supervisors seeing them struggling with the simplest tasks don’t tell them otherwise. While this may seem like an issue not directly related to the work of recruiters, the consequences will actually tarnish their record.

Lattice Research shows that 52% of new hires are actively looking for a new job within the first six months in their new position and this percentage only grows as the months progress. For a recruiter, it means that they’ll have to look for new candidates (which is expensive) and report to executives on why they hired people who left the company so quickly.

A learning management system lets you train new employees on the essentials before they start working in the company. You can tell them about the company culture and mission, their role in the company, etc. And you can even assess their qualifications and soft skills and use the results to filter out candidates. Just assign them the needed training programs and track their progress.

An LMS will show you who completed their assignments and how well. So, if a person missed all the deadlines of the basic courses about the company and the workplace, this might be a wake-up call for you to go your separate ways, as this candidate might be problematic later down the line. On the other hand, if a person completed everything on time and got high scores on tests, you can clearly see this will be an employee worth investing in.

Meanwhile, new hires appreciate such an approach, as it lets them get to their duties right away and get used to their new role. And when they see how fast they grow in their career in your company, they’re unlikely to look for a different organization. Why would they?

Supervisors May Not Know Anything About Recruiting

Another common reason for low recruitment effectiveness is supervisors’ incompetence in HR. They may be highly qualified professionals in their fields, but when it comes to selecting candidates during a job interview, they may not pay attention to people’s soft skills and other important nuances. They mainly focus on hard skills, but it’s rarely the hard skills that damage the team.

To identify potential risks, they need to know human psychology, what questions to ask, what to pay attention to and more. Again, if a supervisor selects a bad candidate, it will most likely not be considered their fault, but a recruiter’s.

Recruiters have the expertise to identify perfect candidates: they select them not only based on solid professional skills but also on a number of other criteria. Some LMSs have a built-in authoring tool that lets you create short eLearning courses explaining all vital aspects of “seeing through people.” You can assign them to supervisors and see whether they completed their assignments and are thus prepared for the interview. The more competent they get in HR, the higher your KPI grows.

Learning Management Systems are Not a Panacea

A training platform is a valuable asset for recruiters but, of course, it’s only an asset. Just as a million-dollar car will break if its driver has poor driving skills, so a learning management system may be ineffective if used poorly. If your KPI is currently low because your performance is less than ideal, you might want to fix this issue first.

But if you’re a solid specialist and need to resolve factors affecting your rates that don’t really depend on you (like business processes and your colleagues’ incompetence), an LMS can be of great help and value.

Authors

Helen Colman

Helen is an editor and content strategist at iSpring. She enjoys combining in-depth research with expert knowledge of the eLearning industry.