How Learning & Development Can Boost Your Hiring Success Rate

Let’s face it. Hiring can be tough. The unemployment rate is low – just 4.4% according to the Department of Labor Statistics – and employers are competing against one another to hire the best talent. So what can you do to boost your hiring success rate? How can you differentiate your company from the rest of the pack?

Here are a few tactics to step up your recruiting and hiring success rate.

A critical first step to creating successful recruiting, hiring, and retention strategies is to obtain data from exit interviews. An exit interview is a structured conversation with departing employees to learn why they are leaving. Exit interviews provide a wealth of information on why people leave and key insights into how you can improve your organization’s ability to recruit and retain talent.

For example, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit learned from exit interviews that they needed to do a better job of onboarding new employees and making them feel welcome. My firm helped them create an onboarding guide for managers that included simple, easy-to-implement suggestions such as sending out an email ahead of time to introduce new hires and encourage other employees to reach out to personally welcome them, giving the new employee their job description and performance expectations the first week, and creating a schedule of mentoring meetings between managers and new employees for the first few months on the job.

A Price Waterhouse Coopers study revealed that Millennials ranked learning and development opportunities as the number one benefit an employer can offer–above financial incentives and flexibility.

With learning & development as the new “perk” that matters, it’s important to take a good look at the kind of learning resources offered as part of your benefits package. Millennials are looking for a learning experience that’s similar to how they watch movies on Netflix or order products on Amazon.

Great mentoring programs also matter to Millennials, according to the 2016 Deliotte Millennial Survey. Where it exists, mentoring is having a positive impact and six in ten (61 percent) Millennials say they are currently benefiting from having somebody to turn to for advice or to help develop their leadership skills.

Plus, according to the same study, Millennials who choose to stay for more than 5 years with their organization are twice as likely to have a mentor (68 percent) than not (32 percent).

I recently worked with MRDC, a nonprofit policy research organization in Manhattan, to create an effective formal mentoring program. Feedback from exit interviews indicated that some former employees experienced feelings of isolation and were unsure how to pursue their career interests. MDRC knew that there was some informal mentoring going on, but it was not consistent. The more assertive staff had no problem approaching others in the organization and asking for help. But other less confident staff didn’t know how to reach out for guidance. Together, we built an amazing mentoring program that has helped MDRC recruit and retain quality staff.

By acting on key information from exit interview data and enhancing attractive benefits that matter to today’s workforce like learning & development, you can inject new energy into your recruitment efforts. In today’s tough job market, you’ll need to get creative at innovating new ways to attract and hire the best.

Judith Lindenberger is President of The Lindenberger Group, an award-winning HR consulting agency. She has over 30 years of experience helping clients create effective human resource management strategies to drive success for their organization and their employees. Lindenberger Group’s seasoned team of consultants offer expert guidance on all aspects of HR from recruitment and staffing to training and development to payroll and compliance. For more information, email info@lindenbergergroup.com.

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