The way companies match candidates to jobs is long overdue for a revolution. For decades, hiring has relied primarily on resumes, interviews and gut feelings to make important people decisions. But as the world of work rapidly evolves, this approach is no longer sufficient.

Brandon Hall Group Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst Michael Rochelle and I had a thorough analyst briefing with Caitlin McGregor, Plum’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, and Michelle Meehan, VP of Marketing at Plum, the innovative Canadian start-up paving the way in next-generation psychometric assessment. Founded by experienced entrepreneurs who are passionate about helping employers make informed decisions about job candidates, Plum is leveraging recent technological advancements to create an efficient, comprehensive solution that takes candidate selection into the future.

“I created Plum to democratize access to psychometric data so that no one would have to rely on luck for someone to realize their superpower,” McGregor states on the company’s website. “Everyone deserves the same opportunity to do great things, and that’s exactly what Plum gives them.”

Through modern machine learning algorithms, Plum helps employers provide detailed data-driven insights into each potential hire, with key indicators including cognitive abilities, personality attributes and technical skills — allowing companies to find their ideal match faster than ever before.

Plum then uses this data to power its matching algorithms. Through an automated 8-minute job analysis, the platform understands the behavioral indicators required for success in any given role. It can then evaluate millions of profiles to identify top matches between people and opportunities.

Plum measures personality, problem-solving skills and social intelligence in every applicant with one 25-minute online assessment, allowing organizations to quantify job fit by comparing individual profiles against the needs of the job.

Early adopters like Manulife, Citibank and Whirlpool are already seeing significant benefits. Plum consistently delivers a 90% quality-of-hire rating from managers and increases retention by up to 77%. HR shouldn’t be a cost center — and Plum can prove it.

Plum also improves diversity hiring by screening overlooked candidates. Plum Talents encapsulate the thoughts, feelings and behaviors that drive candidates. These Talents help uncover what drives — and drains — them and where they’ll find the most success in their careers. Plum realizes that talents live on a spectrum and being high or low in a talent is not a measure of good versus bad. Instead, Plum Talents surface what innate behaviors energize you and which ones deplete you. Understanding the difference means you can advocate for your needs at work and focus on growth over survival.

Perhaps most impressively, Plum has managed to achieve this at scale. Where traditional assessments can take over 100 hours per role, Plum streamlines the process while maintaining a predictive accuracy that is 4x better than resume screening alone. That’s why it’s used in 144 countries and across 20 languages.

As the future of work brings more change and uncertainty, having the right talent in place will be critical for business success. Plum is paving the way for a new paradigm — one where companies can truly understand and optimize their human capital. It’s a revolution that can’t come soon enough.

The post Using Psychometrics and AI to Revolutionize</ br> Talent Assessment appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

“The Great Resignation.” “Quiet Quitting.” “The Big Stay.” The Talent Marketplace has become increasingly complex and competitive over the course of this past year. Talent Acquisition teams are faced with an unprecedented pace of change that threatens to leave them behind. Almost as soon as a new tech or new approach makes its way into the conversation, it becomes outdated. Ultimately, the measure of success in Talent Acquisition (TA) is the ability of the business to deliver results and the quality of the teammates TA is bringing in the door.

This survey is focused on understanding what great looks like amidst all of this change. Organizations need to be thinking about the candidate experience, what it takes to build and sustain a successful TA practice and the impact of technology and automation on both. “Innovation has found a home in Talent Acquisition. But what we are most interested in is what all this innovation means for the candidate experience,” said Michael Rochelle, Brandon Hall Group Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst.

Questions in the survey focus on topics like:

• How are you measuring quality of hire?
• How are you tracking and measuring the candidate experience?
• Which technologies do you find most effective in attracting, engaging and ultimately hiring talent?
• How do you mitigate the digital “blackhole” created by automation on the candidate experience?
• In what phase of the process are you using automation or AI or do you plan to begin using it in your cycle?
• How would you describe the return on technology in your hiring practices?

“With the rise of the latest war for talent, companies need to find and utilize every advantage possible to secure the best talent, particularly as jobs evolve and the supply of skills in the right areas remains lower,” said Brandon Hall Group CEO Mike Cooke.

The survey goes live on Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2023, and the results will be available in Q4.

About Brandon Hall Group:

Brandon Hall Group is the only professional development company that offers data, research, insights and certification to Learning and Talent executives and organizations. The best minds in Human Capital Management (HCM) choose Brandon Hall Group to help them create future-proof employee development plans for the new era.

For 30 years, we have empowered, recognized and certified excellence in organizations around the world influencing the development of over 10 million employees and executives. Our HCM Excellence Awards® program was the first to recognize organizations for learning and talent and is the gold standard, known as the “Academy Awards of Human Capital Management.”

Our cloud-based platform delivers evidence-based insights in the areas of Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Diversity and Inclusion, Talent Acquisition and HR for corporate organizations and HCM solution providers.

To learn more, visit www.brandonhall.com.

The post Brandon Hall Group™ Launching Survey</ br>on Effective Talent Acquisition appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

This is an old saying that is highly relevant to talent retention: “You only get one chance to make a great first impression.”

That is why new-hire onboarding is so important. Onboarding is an employer’s first — and best — chance to connect with new employees in a positive way.

Unfortunately, most organizations are bad at it. A Gallup study found only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job of onboarding new hires. Brandon Hall Group research shows that 9% of employers rank onboarding as excellent and that 56% are in the early stages of developing onboarding or have no formal process in place.

Schoox, a Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Preferred Provider, believes onboarding is perhaps the most important step in retaining talent. Their onboarding solutions make it easier for employers to effectively train employees as soon as they arrive on the job so they can quickly contribute and feel ready to do so. This is especially critical in high-turnover, front-line-focused work environments like restaurants, retail and manufacturing, where new hires often need to be trained quickly on almost every aspect of their job.

Some companies focus onboarding on initiating new hires to the culture and treat skills training as a separate process. In reality, learning should be the driver of teaching new employees about the culture and at the same time preparing them for success.

Our research shows that many organizations are using the following learning approaches during onboarding:

• Experiential learning (81%)
• Formal in-person instructor-led classes (72%)
• Peer-to-peer learning (70%)
• Microlearning (62%)
• Goal setting (61%)
• Coaching/mentoring (48%)
• Assessments (47%)

Many research studies show that the biggest driver of talent retention is creating great employee experiences. That process starts with onboarding. You can make a great first impression or struggle continuously to change a bad one.

If you are one of the many organizations looking to reimagine onboarding, I’ll leave you with a few critical questions to consider:

• Is your onboarding a standalone training event or a sustained journey to proficiency with ongoing support and reinforcement?
• Does your onboarding deliver the message that the organization cares about employees’ skills and career development and will support them in their learning journey?
• Is your onboarding scalable?
• Are you able to capture enough data to assess the impact of onboarding both on individuals and the organization?
• Does your onboarding approach help new hires build a social network of mentors and co-workers?

The post Great Training During Onboarding Drives Talent Retention appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Brandon Hall Group conducted a pulse survey in March 2023 in an attempt to understand the extent of workforce reductions and their subsequent impact on employees, managers, and the organization as a whole. Roughly two-thirds of respondents are from outside North America, and more than half indicated their organization has already reduced their workforce this year or estimates that a workforce reduction will occur at some point. Notably, responses were consistent across demographic groups regarding the impact of layoffs on employees of the organization, except in a few instances, which will be noted later in this Strategy Brief. 

Some survey results were expected, particularly around decision-making and impact on employee morale. Several influences were unexpected in that they reflect a change or divergence from accepted norms or practices. This Strategy Brief will explore those before recommending how companies navigating the aftermath or planning for a workforce reduction can best position their retained workforce for continued success. 

Workforce Reduction’s Focus 

The impact of layoffs on employees of the organization has effective ways to address and overcome it as a company. Our conducted surveys explore the employees’ morale, motivation, and reaction to the company’s situations. We will additionally address how the downsizing affects those who stay and how to keep them satisfied with their jobs throughout the process.

Expected Impacts of Downsizing in an Organization

When a company faces a workforce reduction, questions that often come to mind are: 

• How did you make the decision on who would be affected? 
• How are those who were not separated handling the change? 
• What else is the organization doing to cut costs? 

The answers to those questions in this survey are largely as you might expect. Regarding the question of how decisions were made, responses show that the primary determinants were performance and tenure. These are the logical places to start as a reduction certainly offers you an opportunity to clean house of low performers and performance is often (though not always) very well-documented. Tenure is another logical starting point as companies will many times look to those most recently hired as well as those closest to typical retirement age. While these are to be expected, we will make the case that adding in potential as a more frequently used filter may be critically important.

In terms of impact to remaining employees’ morale and commitment, most companies indicated a moderate impact of downsizing on an organization. Individuals who remain employed when a reduction takes place often feel demoralized. It is logical that they would question whether their own jobs are also at risk. It is no surprise to learn that companies see a 59% high impact on morale and a 47% high impact on trust and loyalty following a workforce reduction. Increased communication in both frequency and transparency is a critical response. 

Part of addressing the pressure on trust and loyalty from your surviving workforce is looking at what else the company is doing to manage expenses to shore up the organization from further job losses. Once again, survey responses are in line with what you might expect to hear. Measures such as hiring freezes, removing low performers sooner and giving high performers more opportunities top that list. 

Unexpected Results of Workforce Reduction

One of the top unexpected strategies listed by companies to reduce costs was to rescind job offers. We categorize that as a surprising result because we would anticipate that WFM practices would keep hiring in line with core business needs and hiring freezes would be implemented long before the decision to reduce the workforce is executed, allowing processes the time to even out. 

Another unexpected result is that salary reductions are not higher on the list of potential cost-saving actions (less than 10% of responses). This is surprising because reducing payroll expenses is the end goal of a workforce reduction. Leveraging a minimal pay cut of 1-3% across the board can result in substantial savings for an organization. Perhaps this is due to the proximity of responses during the COVID era where salary reductions were heavily deployed by organizations seeking to avoid layoffs and maybe those companies have yet to return to pre-COVID salaries as is. 

Our most unexpected result, however, is that more than one-fourth of organizations that responded indicated that their organization is taking no other cost-saving actions in the wake of a workforce reduction. In this modern era of work and the sustained volatility of the economic climate, it seems irresponsible at best and negligent at worst to fail to deploy a truly holistic and balanced approach to cost reduction strategies. Reducing your workforce should be your last line of defense, not your first.

How we can reduce the impact of layoffs on employees of the organization.

If you are in a position of leadership in an organization that is looking at cost-saving measures and the potential need to reduce your workforce as part of that strategy, consider the following approaches.

Look at Long-Term Potential

As previously stated, performance and tenure are common decision points when determining who may be affected by a reduction in workforce. In neglecting potential as a parameter in decision-making, companies are failing to consider the longer-term implications of their decisions. Concurrent to this latest wave of “right-sizing” is the conversation about the future of work, upskilling and reskilling needs in the workforce, and making sure the company is ready for what’s next. This is arguably a more critical conversation than ever before. 

When evaluating employee populations, teams should ask themselves: 

To be clear, we are not advocating that you overlook obvious performance deficiencies in favor of future potential. We are recommending that you include future potential as a filter to ensure you are not overlooking someone you will need to deliver success in the future. 

In this same vein, if you are forced to separate teammates, consider providing upskilling/ reskilling roadmaps as part of separation packages where it might make sense. Helping individuals plan for a future state can engender loyalty and a willingness to return. Then follow through on bringing back those who meet the expectations at the earliest possible opportunity.

Revisit WFM Practices 

A time of economic stress that results in workforce reductions often offers an ideal opportunity to revisit workflows, policies and procedures, and ensure they are optimized. Particularly if hiring freezes are driving your savings plans, it is worth looking at how forecasting and job approval processes are managed to minimize overextending your workforce needs. Revisit data collection plans, consider exclusionary periods before posting openings and tap into the power of internal stretch assignments to fill roles with a net-zero headcount increase in the shorter term. 

Protect Remaining Staff 

Many respondents indicated that they plan to give high performers more opportunities on a go-forward basis. Be careful that this doesn’t become code for “dump more work on our best people” without looking at corresponding support structures and workflows. Opportunities for growth, broader exposure, or promotion are one thing. Burying good people in even more work without proper transition, support, or fair compensation is a recipe for disaster. With our Enterprise Membership, you can explore the full potential of your organization, because when the market begins to stabilize, and it will, those high performers will be the first to head for the door, and you’ll want to know what to do next.

Workforce Reduction: Key Takeaways

It is easy to fall back on long-standing practices when economic pressures require you to consider headcount reduction to manage costs. We now have more tools, information, and knowledge at our disposal, so companies must be far more intentional and planful in their decision-making. 

This will minimize any negative impact of downsizing on an organization‘s employees as much as possible. Being resourceful when it comes to employees management supposes great importance, on Brandon Hall’s Excellence Club Membership you can access resources in six main areas, focusing your HR on development and change, to shape the current practices and what may come next. We should be thinking beyond the immediate pressure relief to factor in the return to normal in the future.

The post Impact of Layoffs On Employees of The Organization appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Boca Raton, FL — March 13, 2023

Brandon Hall Group, the leading independent HCM research and analyst firm, is launching a study on March 14 to gain insight into how organizations are working through reductions in their workforce. 

“Reductions in the workforce have become a reality for many organizations during these turbulent times. The impact of these reductions will have short- and long-term effects on their workforce. This survey explores the extent of reductions in the workforce, and their impact on employees, managers and the organization,” said Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal HCM Analyst.  

Brandon Hall Group’s research initiative seeks to uncover the following about workforce reductions:

• Timing of reductions
• Assistance to laid-off employees
• Impact on remaining managers and employees
• Impact on organization
• Future workforce considerations

To participate in this study, go to Brandon Hall Group Workforce Reduction Research. Participants will receive summary results of the research six to eight weeks after the survey launch. 

“The urgency of addressing a workforce reduction’s impact on the viability of an organization is a top priority for HR organizations. If not handled properly, a reduction will permanently impact an organization’s ability to attract and retain talent,” said Brandon Hall Group CEO Mike Cooke. 

This quantitative research will be complemented with qualitative interviews. The data and insights will fuel the development of research reports and tools — such as self-assessment tools, models and frameworks — to help organizations improve talent retention efforts.

About Brandon Hall Group:

Brandon Hall Group is the only professional development company that offers data, research, insights and certification to Learning and Talent executives and organizations. The best minds in Human Capital Management (HCM) choose Brandon Hall Group to help them create future-proof employee development plans for the new era. 

For over 30 years, we have empowered, recognized and certified excellence in organizations around the world influencing the development of over 10 million employees and executives. Our HCM Excellence Awards program was the first to recognize organizations for learning and talent and is the gold standard, known as the “Academy Awards of Human Capital Management.”

Our cloud-based platform delivers evidence-based insights in the areas of Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Diversity and Inclusion, Talent Acquisition and HR for corporate organizations and HCM solution providers.

To learn more, visit www.brandonhall.com.

The post Brandon Hall Group to Launch Study on Workforce Reduction appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

What separates a truly great ATS from just an applicate database is largely in automation and integration. Automation allows hiring to be done at a scale that just can’t be done manually, especially in today’s environment of hiring done outside of traditional locations.

HireRoad, a Brandon Hall Group Preferred Provider, understands the importance of automated hiring processes that configure to organizations’ business needs and preferred recruitment workflow. The company goes well beyond that, however, and sees “being hired” to include everything from job posting to employee success. 

This strategic approach is critical for attracting applicants of all different worker types, demographics, and geographies. Add to that the need to manage those applicants if you can successfully bring them in, and the power of automation truly makes itself known. Automation can:

• Allow for instant candidate communication, regardless of volume 
• Automate self-scheduled interviews and video screening for a more adaptive approach to remote recruitment
• Complete new hire paperwork digitally 
• Automate new hire training to improve time-to-full-productivity 

Also, having the right systems in place to support the candidate experience (and by continuation, the employee experience) is important for recruitment, but being able to tell if differentiated recruiting is having a positive effect requires more than just one system. Currently, just over half of organizations can connect their LMS, HRIS, and onboarding to their ATS, but at most only two-thirds of all organizations have any systems integration at all, according to Brandon Hall Group research. 

With more workplaces becoming hybrid or fully remote, it becomes imperative that we create candidate experiences that reflect our unique cultures and organizational brand. The ATS may hide in the shadows, but successful organizations will see that now is the ATS’ time in the spotlight.

The post The Applicant Tracking System: The Unsung Hero of Recruitment appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

There really have been too many different upheavals, global events, workplace revolutions, and various names people have made to describe all of those phenomena to remember here. The lesson from all of this is that unpredictability is just the new way of life, both at home and in the (traditional or virtual) office. 

What does this mean for the professionals who are trying to keep their business staffed with the best and brightest people, regardless of internal and external challenges? That we must be resilient, adaptable, and flexible in how we approach the competitive landscape of recruiting, hiring, and onboarding.

Simply throwing money at the problem by increasing salaries is not the solution, even if it were an option (which it isn’t). Having a flexible work schedule was listed as more important than compensation in maintaining a strong Employer Value Proposition, according to Brandon Hall Group’s latest research, and having a flexible work location was nearly as important. 

Again, simply having the option to work from home or allowing for self-scheduling is not enough. Your organization must have the policies, procedures, and technology to allow that to happen. The process must be automated, seamless, and personalized for all different types of employees. This requires flexibility on the part of the TA professional, their organization, and the systems that support the entire endeavor. 

All of this is not to frighten anyone into inaction, but rather an appeal to think differently about how we go about the hiring process, and how we can best support our organizations’ strategic efforts with the hiring process. After all, we are asking for our employees to be flexible, so it’s only fair that we show the same adaptability in how we hire. 

• Creating an Adaptable Approach to Talent Acquisition is an on-demand webinar available here

The post How Flexible Do You Need to Be to Win the War for Talent? appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

The Challenge

Getting and keeping employees engaged in learning is an ongoing challenge for most businesses. Training programs that are static and event-based come across as large, boring and intrusive to people’s daily work. Organizations need to do a better job at driving the adoption of learning programs, as well as reinforcing and supporting the concepts and skills the learning is trying to build. There are several key elements characteristics L&D teams can bring into their learning programs to make them more effective. The learning should:

• Be engaging
• Provide opportunities to try and fail
• Provide reinforcement of key concepts
• Give learners a sense of accomplishment or mastery
• Include collaboration with peers
• Offer some kind of reward or recognition

An aspect of learning that can deliver on all of these points but is often overlooked is gamification. It is passed over for seeming frivolous or gimmicky, but when leveraged properly, gamification can really drive results.

The Rethink

Gamification touches on many critical points that make learning successful. Far from being frivolous, game-based learning injects elements of fun, play and competition in pursuit of serious results. Within the context of a learning program, gamification can:

• Encourage strategic thinking
• Provide an opportunity for practice learning
• Enhance learner motivation among disengaged learners
• Promote healthy competition
• Improve self-direction and independent thinking
• Foster collaboration
• Afford a safe environment for learning through experimentation and trial-and-error
• Help develop a spirit of patience and persistence among learners

There are two approaches when it comes to gamification in learning. First, there is the practice of adding gamification elements to existing learning content. This can include awarding points for completing certain steps, publishing a leaderboard for learners to compare progress, or providing badges or achievements for “leveling up.”

The second approach is game-based learning, where the learning occurs as the learner plays an actual game. These could be as simple as a word search or a matching exercise or as complex as an action-based video game.

Both approaches are effective and have their own use cases. In either case, understanding the impact game mechanics can have as a learning tool is important to ensure they are being used properly. Not only can they provide a contrast to more formal, traditional eLearning content, but games are also more closely and clearly tied to specific learning objectives, making them more relevant and contextual. 

The Recommendation

What Brandon Hall Group Says About EI Design’s Solution

EI Design has a comprehensive understanding of game-based learning and gamification and they work with clients to design programs that fit their needs. They can repackage an organization’s existing content with gamification elements to make it more engaging and promote critical thinking. At the same time, however, EI Design knows that games are not the right solution in every case, so they work with clients to find the right fit.

It starts with identifying the right strategy. EI design aligns their gamification approach to the expectations of the client’s learning program. These can include improved motivation, improved engagement, or more rewarding experiences. This is how they know which games or gamification elements will make the most sense. Some examples of this alignment include:

• Driving learner engagement – Use challenges and rewards
• Motivating learner performance – Use leaderboards, badges, and points
• Promote healthy competition – Us group points and leaderboards

An organization cannot implement any gamification strategy without a solid understanding of employee knowledge needs. EI Design always begins its approach with this kind of needs analysis. It is also important to understand the behavior change that is required. This will determine what kind of game or game mechanics are used and how. Instructions for the games must be clear and concise to ensure a positive experience.

EI Design uses proven gamification approaches and techniques to achieve successful gamification, including focusing on longer-term gamification which can include gaming apps, VR integration, microlearning, and personalized gaming challenges. Ultimately, their approach to game-based learning is driving learner adoption, engagement, retention and performance.

• David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group

The post How to Drive Learner Engagement and Performance Through Gamification appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Boca Raton, FL — Sept. 9, 2022

Brandon Hall Group, the leading independent HCM research and analyst firm, is launching its annual HCM Outlook study on Sept. 13 to understand the priorities of organizations in the coming year and how hybrid work, economic uncertainty, the “Great Resignation” and other disruptors will impact goals and objectives.

The study focuses on investment (in time and money) in Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition, Human Resources, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I), Future of Work/Digital Transformation and Metaverses.
The research will also identify trends regarding how:

• The evolution of the hybrid workplace is impacting the approach to human capital management strategies and priorities
• The ongoing talent retention crisis is shaping trends in hiring and developing talent
• Organizations plan to address the impact of inflation and other economic variables and the possibility of a recession in 2023

To participate in this study, go to https://www.research.net/r/F6THZT3. Participants will receive summary results of the research six to eight weeks after the survey launch and will get immediate download access to the Brandon Hall Group research summary eBook, Learning and the Future of Work.

“We believe HR and business leaders are at a critical crossroads,” said Brandon Hall Group CEO Mike Cooke. “They are adapting to an emerging workforce, an evolving hybrid work environment, social, political and economic volatility and more critical technology choices than ever before. It’s not overly dramatic to say that the strategies deployed in 2023 could impact critical business outcomes for the rest of the decade.”

This quantitative research will be complemented with qualitative interviews. The data and insights will fuel the development of research reports and tools — such as self-assessment tools, models and frameworks — to help organizations improve their use of technology to drive talent outcomes.

About Brandon Hall Group:

Brandon Hall Group is the only professional development company that offers data, research, insights and certification to Learning and Talent executives and organizations. The best minds in Human Capital Management (HCM) choose Brandon Hall Group to help them create future-proof employee development plans for the new era. 

For over 28 years, we have empowered, recognized and certified excellence in organizations around the world influencing the development of over 10 million employees and executives. Our HCM Excellence Awards program was the first to recognize organizations for learning and talent and is the gold standard, known as the “Academy Awards of Human Capital Management.”

Our cloud-based platform delivers evidence-based insights in the areas of Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Diversity and Inclusion, Talent Acquisition and HR for corporate organizations and HCM solution providers.

To learn more, visit www.brandonhall.com.

The post Brandon Hall Group to Launch Study of 2023 HR Priorities appeared first on BrandonHallGroup.

Organizations are facing a tight talent market and retaining employees is becoming a huge business priority. One of the most critical periods for companies is the new-hire phase when the chances of losing an employee are higher than if they stay with the company for a while. This is one of the main reasons the onboarding process is so critical. Talent can be hard to find and expensive to replace. New hire retention is the number one metric that companies use for their onboarding programs.

Unfortunately, new-hire training is fraught with challenges. Often the onboarding process involves a disjointed and fragmented learning experience with one-size-fits-all training and too much information presented all at once. Managers are kept out of the loop, waiting for people to be fully onboarded and not engaging when it means the most. This can leave new hires discouraged rather than energized.

Business leaders need new hires to be up and running ASAP, but the process is often siloed and difficult to measure, leaving leaders with little insight. While leaders want their new hires to be ready to work ASAP, they lack insights into the onboarding process so it can be difficult to know what is working and what isn’t.

Brandon Hall Group Smartchoice® Preferred Provider Realizeit works with clients to completely transform how they approach onboarding and new hire training. They see it as a critical piece of a much larger, ongoing learning experience. Without that continuity, organizations risk low engagement among employees or even loss through attrition. Rather than a steady stream of forms and documents with some training sprinkled in, Realizeit has four key principles it applies to onboarding:

1. Provide a great personalized experience
2. Engage and motivate
3. Provide support and oversight
4. Evaluate and assess

Brandon Hall Group’s Impact of Onboarding Study finds that personalization is the number one feature companies want from their onboarding technology. Providing this kind of experience helps plug the employee into the organization and its culture, providing the “what’s in it for me” right out of the gate. This builds learner engagement early and sets the tone for the learning experience moving forward. 

New hires also need adequate support during this critical time. Most are not ready to “do it alone.” They need support from learning designers, trainers, and especially managers and supervisors. Building in this support provides coaching opportunities and gives learners a chance to provide feedback as well. I recently spent some time discussing this approach to onboarding with Realizeit CEO Manoj Kulkarni on a webinar. We talked about these four key new hire training elements and what goes into making them happen. We also talked about the critical need to transition from onboarding to ongoing learning to drive better retention and performance among new hires.

–David Wentworth, Principal Learning Analyst, Brandon Hall Group
@davidmwentworth

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