As a staffing leader, getting new recruiters and reps up to speed quickly is one of your most important jobs. The sooner they’re able to make quota, the better. Yet the reality is, most recruiters and sales reps struggle to achieve proficiency in their new position and many never make it.
The impact of this churn is costly. Brad Smart, author of Topgrading for Sales, states that the average cost of a failed ramp-up is six times the base salary for a salesperson. Despite those staggering numbers, staffing companies traditionally have taken the “water through the firehose” approach to onboarding.
The problem, however, is there is a lot a recruiter and a salesperson must learn before they can be considered fully ramped up and “sales ready” or “recruiting ready.”
There is customer and candidate knowledge, sales and recruiting process knowledge, CRM/ATS training, company history and service offering knowledge, and pricing and capabilities.
That right there is a lot of information to retain, and we haven’t even touched on skills training, the actual skills and techniques a new hire needs to develop in order to be successful. There is just too much information to absorb all at once.
When employers try to cram too much information in too short of a time period into their onboarding, they actually make it harder and slower for new hires to become competent and productive.
Helping recruiters and sales reps retain information quickly and validating that they can execute those skills in the field is the ideal scenario for staffing and training leaders. But it requires planning.
We offer a blueprint for optimizing recruiter and sales onboarding for IT staffing professionals, broken down into 6 steps including details on how technology can support and sustain your program.
New recruiters and salespeople need to know specifically what they have to learn and in what sequence. Even experienced recruiters and salespeople need this – especially if they’re working in a new market or branch office or where they lack familiarity with your specific customers and the customer or candidate’s decision making process.
For example, suppose your sales cycle is 90 days from initial cold call to placement. With a three-month sales cycle, you should want your reps to be fully onboarded in three phases, with each phase lasting one month.
The first phase of your sales onboarding would incorporate all of the knowledge, skills and tools a new salesperson needs in order to successfully execute the first 1/3 of your sales or recruiting process. But don’t forget, you’re not just planning for thirty days.
To ensure your new hire succeeds, it’s essential to create an onboarding plan that accounts for the entire sales and recruiting process including all tasks and activities your sales rep or recruiter must complete and each of the candidate and customer touch points along the way.
This sorting process enables you to create a timeline for learning. More importantly, it will highlight what a new recruiter or salesperson needs to learn today vs. down the road.
For example, it may be really important for your new hires to start meeting with prospects as soon as they possibly can but how will that training help them get candidates and prospects to return their voicemail and email messages?
As mentioned previously, you want to teach your new hires the the messaging, process and knowledge in the sequence they will need it.
Don’t put the cart before the horse; it will only overwhelm your new hire and slow the learning process. Map out what your new salespeople will need to learn during their first day of work, what they will need to know in week 1, week 2, 30 Days, 60 Days and 90 Days, and repeat the process for a recruiter.
Take it from me that this is an iterative process. Once you start using this onboarding plan, you’ll quickly discover ways to make it even better.
Now that you have your training content in buckets, you can chart a sequence of training modules for each one.
Remember: the goal is to deliver your training so that your new hires can be productive throughout the onboarding process, rather than having to get through the entire program first before they begin selling or recruiting.So instead of training on each topic in its entirety, you can assign specific training modules from each bucket to the appropriate phase.
For example, let’s assume we have a technology and tools bucket and in that bucket is CRM/ATS training. Most CRM and ATS systems are complex, and each area within the CRM requires training. But a new recruiter or sales rep doesn’t need to know everything about the CRM/ATS in order to begin selling or recruiting.
So what do they need to learn right away?
For instance, a new sales rep needs to know how to enter leads or contacts into the CRM/ATS but they don’t need to know how to put a job order in the system or extend an assignment or manage time cards and invoicing.
At this point you’re probably thinking, “wow, this is a lot of work, what sort of ROI can and should I expect from my new hire onboarding and training program?”
Here are a few of the key factors that you should consider when determining the ROI of your onboarding and training program:
A recent report by Harvard Business Review found that only 37 percent of new salespeople will become consistent performers. And according to a study conducted by Training Industry.com, even after you find a good sales rep or recruiter, it is still going to take you on average 381 days to get that new hire executing at the same performance level as your tenured employees.
Those statistics make it sound like we have a better chance of winning the lottery than successfully onboarding a new recruiter or sales rep.
As you’re probably aware, more and more educational institutions (and businesses) are adopting online learning. This is largely due to the increase in affordable and easy to use technology and rapidly growing demand for an engaging learning experience (think Millennials).
However, if your IT staffing firm has been utilizing traditional training methods (I.E. read the corporate handbook, shadow training and classroom training) than it may be daunting to even consider adopting an online training model. Below are just three advantages you will get from an online, web-based training solution.
You’ll also need a mechanism to assess whether or not your new recruiters and sales reps achieved the competencies necessary to be successful.
To do that, you will need to create certification exams that incorporate a multitude of questions for testing your new hires engagement with your training material and their level of comprehension.
But you can’t stop there, because using quiz questions stop short of telling you whether or not your new hire can execute. To test whether or not your new hire can execute a critical customer or candidate conversation, you will need to create role play scenarios for your employees to practice rehearsing their conversations.
Let’s assume that in order to “graduate” from Phase 1 of your sales new hire onboarding, your new hire needs to physically demonstrate they can lead an insightful, consultative customer conversation. To do this, the sales manager will need to create the role play scenarios and define the specific evaluation criteria that will define and determine whether or not the rep successfully executed an insightful, consultative customer conversation.
Then, the rep will have to demonstrate that they can execute the task by executing a role play. With a web-based training solution, however, sales reps (and recruiters) could audio and video record themselves into their computer webcam executing such a conversation in which the recording can be made available for the manager to evaluate and review, thus automating the process.
Finally, managers need to provide both quantitative and qualitative feedback on their new hires performance. To do that, you can also audio and video record all role plays for the entire team to watch and learn from. You can use the video recordings much like you would when going on a diet by taking “before and after” videos to track improvement.
