Hiring managers love to talk about training during interviews.
“We have a great training program….”
“We can teach you how to do this business better than anyone else in our marketplace….”
“If you sign-up today, we can get you into the class that starts next week…”
According to new research, touting your training program during the hiring process may be hindering your chances of making a great hire.
Why? It’s not the way people learn in today’s workforce.
Self-Directed Learning
The research on this topic was conducted by Degreed and was recently summarized in an online slide-share presentation.
Here is how employees learn in today’s workforce:
L&D stands for “Learning and Development.” It’s company provided or sponsored training.
In terms of time, the researcher reported,
Workers spend about 1% of the average work week (37 minutes) on their employers’ training. However, they invest 3.3 hours a week on their own.
Where Do Employees Go for Help?
Another way to look at the data is to consider where employees find answers when they have questions.
In terms of time spent in each area interacting with their company’s formal training system, the results were even more surprising.
Most workplace learning infrastructure doesn’t really work for today’s workers. They only use their organization’s learning systems once every four months. That’s only partly because those systems are mainly used for structured, formal training.
Recruiting and Training
If you’re interviewing individuals from outside the real estate industry, you’re probably not helping yourself by talking about your company’s training program.
From the candidates’ perspective, you’re offering them something that was generally useless and unappreciated at their last place of employment.
How do progressive companies handle this issue?
They talk about the learning environment in their companies (i.e. everyone is always learning and sharing ideas).
They talk about the knowledgeable and helpful people they’ll get to interact with in this role.
They talk about autonomy. Being a real estate agent is about setting your own course and learning new stuff every day. We’re not going to box you in and try to train you in some methodology that will be obsolete a few months from now.
As Karen May, VP of People Development at Google recently said,
[We] put the support structures in place to make learning happen and then get out of the way.
I know the difference may sound subtle, but high-quality candidates want to learn—not be trained.
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