How does your organization view its learning management system (LMS)? Is it simply an internal tool, a way to deliver training and development opportunities to existing employees? That’s a perfectly fine way to use an LMS, of course, but if you stop there, you’re failing to leverage your LMS to its full potential.
In today’s world, an LMS is more than a professional development portal. It’s a valuable recruiting tool too.
Employees Want Meaningful Work and the Chance to Grow
To understand how your LMS can be a recruiting tool, you first have to understand what today’s professionals want from their jobs.
One thing employees want – across all generations, according to Harvard Business Review – is meaningful work. As one person quoted in the HBR article put it, “I would rather make nothing and love going to work every day than make a ton of money and hate going to work every day.”
Of course, “meaningful work” is a broad term. Defined generally, it means work that fulfills a person, that makes them feel good about themselves, their job, and their impact on their role. More specifically, meaningful work can take a variety of forms. According to HBR, it includes work/life balance, good connections with coworkers, a positive social impact, the achievement of goals, and the improvement of one’s skills.
It is those last two forms of meaningful work that matter most for our purposes: the achievement of goals and the improvement of one’s skills.
This is quite literally what a good LMS is all about: challenging employees to better themselves and achieve their personal and professional goals. If you have an LMS that offers people the very things they seek in their jobs, why not flaunt that fact?
Beyond meaningful work, candidates are also calling specifically for professional development opportunities. Millennials, in particular, are drawn to development: 87 percent said it was important to them in a 2016 Gallup poll. But it’s not just millennials: 76 percent of employees view professional development as one of the top three non-financial motivators.
Plus, professional development is good for retention: 40 percent of employees who don’t receive robust training and development opportunities leave their jobs within a year. It’s also good for the performance of your overall business: When your employees have more access to learning and development, they’ll sharpen their skills and acquire new ones. This, in turn, makes them more competent and capable on the job.
In short, your LMS offers the very same things that talented professionals want from their jobs. You miss a valuable opportunity by not playing up your LMS during the recruiting process. To get great employees, you have to prove you can meet their needs.
3 Easy Ways to Flaunt Your LMS During the Recruiting Process
If you’re ready to put your LMS to work as a recruiting tool, try one of these tactics:
1. Incorporate Your LMS Into Your Employer Branding Efforts
Employer branding works best when it centers the needs and desires of potential employees, so why not throw a spotlight on how your company can help candidates progress as professionals?
Look for ways to incorporate your LMS and the opportunities it provides into your employer branding materials. For example, you can post photos and videos of employees using the LMS on Instagram, Twitter, and your company careers page – accompanied by a description of how your LMS helps employees pursue their professional goals.
You can even take it a step further by recording an interview with an employee who has climbed the career ladder at your company. Have the employee explain their journey and describe how the company supported them along the way. Your LMS will be a star player in this video, as it gave the employee the resources they needed to succeed.
2. Use It In Pre-employment Tests
Whether you use job knowledge tests, skills assessments or personality tests as part of your application process, you can use your LMS to do the heavy lifting for you. Not only do your potential candidates see your LMS in action but you can deliver these tests without adding any more time and resources than is necessary to the selection process.
For example, you can automate part of the screening process. Before picking candidates to interview, you can send them to your portal to complete your tests of choice. Candidates who pass those tests, get through to the next round.
Leveraging your learning management system in this way also gives you a great reason to talk about it in the interview stage.
3. Bring It Up During Interviews
When a candidate makes it to the interview stage, be sure to reserve part of the conversation for a discussion of the candidate’s career aspirations. Ask them about their desired career path and the skills they’d like to acquire.
Armed with this information, you can then make the case for why your organization is the right place for the candidate to pursue their professional goals. Explain the programs, resources, and support your company can offer – including, of course, your LMS and how it fits into the picture.
Again, success stories will go a long way here. If you can tell the candidate about an existing employee who has successfully charted the same path using the resources your organization has to offer, all the better.
Conclusion
Ultimately, recruiting is a matter of convincing candidates you’re the right company for them. It sounds simple, but it requires nuanced strategies. One such strategy is putting your LMS to work as a recruiting tool. When you prove that your company can help candidates achieve their goals and improve their skills, you’ll have top-tier talent flocking to you in no time.
Author Bio: Matthew Kosinski is managing editor of Recruiter.com.
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