Three Ways Company Trainers Can Help Hire Top Talent

Corporate trainers and educators are profit drivers now — and in more ways than one. Although their primary impact on a company is by training employees to master high-impact skills that help improve business performance, they can also add value (and profit) in other ways, too.

Company educators have an unique knowledge of employees’ skills, aptitudes, and educational development. If that knowledge is put to work during the recruiting and hiring process, they can be in a position to add tremendous value to a company by helping hire only the best and most capable new employees.

Here are three ways company educators can help that process along:

Broadcast Your Commitment to Education

Organizations that make education important attract A-level employees. This level of employee is always searching for companies that have an environment where it is easy to learn and grow, and important to the company, as well. So let people know your organization is committed to employees’ personal and professional growth.

Hiring managers could interview company educators about their organization’s learning, performance, and development culture, and post these video interviews on the company’s hiring page on their website. (Personal note: my suggestion to all companies I consult with is that they should create a career center on their website. This is the place where all jobs are listed — including the responsibilities, abilities, and skills required for each job — and where all job applicants can learn more about the hiring and application process, the workplace culture, and personality of the organization, and where videos from the company’s employees share what life is like at the company.)

Include a Skills Assessment During Recruiting Visits

It’s important to make sure you’re recruiting the right people. So have educators (and internal subject matter experts) prepare skill assessments that can be given to candidates at job fairs and at other recruiting venues. Educators can spend time with those who represent the company at these events to share how to ask the skill assessment questions, or how to monitor the completion of a formal skill assessment.

Include Trainers During the Interview

A job candidate’s attitude toward learning and growing is very telling about their attitude toward performance and achieving excellence. And since trainers and company educators can have a keen sense about people’s feelings on development, it may make sense for your company to actually include a trainer during the actual interview process to talk with a job prospect about their interest in education.

The training teams in most companies are smaller than they’ve been in years because of the tough economy; we are all getting more done with less. So not only must we be more clever about our recruiting, but we must also be wiser in our candidate selection. We must use every resource on our team to attract, hire and retain additions to that team.

Educators should have an expanded company role — not only in developing powerful education programs, but also by attracting avid learners and assessing job candidate learning potential in interviews. Learning and growing is critical for success in today’s companies. It therefore seems right that today’s educators have a voice in bringing in the next generation of smart, high-performing talent.

More: Three Reasons Training Is Now a Profit Driver.

Jay Forte is a nationally ranked thought leader and President of Humanetrics. Jay guides organizations — their leaders and managers — in how to attract, hire and retain today’s best talent. He is the author of Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition and The Greatness Zone – Know Yourself, Find Your Fit, Transform The World. Jay is a member of SHRM, ASTD, the National Speakers Association and the Florida Speakers Association. Follow him on Twitter.

Image via Success That Lasts.

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