For the past ten years, learning management systems (LMS) and talent management solutions have been on a collision course mostly through vendor acquisitions, culminating last year with the acquisition of Learn.com by Taleo. As I’ve noted in previous posts, LMS delivers significant business value independent of the other functions. In the next series of posts, we’ll explore the intersection points a bit more and examine how a learning solution adds value across the entire talent management suite.  For those of you who would prefer to watch a webianr replay, the session is embedded below as a SlideCast presentation.

There are three key overlaps between learning and the other areas of talent management:

• Recruiting and Onboarding
• Performance Management and Goal Planning
• Succession Planning

Industry-leading LMS solutions like Taleo Learn™ add a new dimension to the talent management lifecycle by providing tools and capabilities to develop talent throughout their extended enterprise.  In some ways, this reveals an interesting parallel with recruiting, the only other talent management area that is explicitly designed and expected to reach outside the core employee base.  When combined with the Taleo Talent Exchange, our crowd-sourced sourcing capability, we think that recruiting and externally-facing learning offerings can drive new value and business benefit to our clients.  More on this in a future post…

In this first blog post in the series, we’re going to focus on the impact that Learning can have on Recruiting and Onboarding.

Recruiting and Onboarding

Before we talk about the interplay and value of learning and recruiting, we need to first clearly identify the core business challenges that recruiting solutions solve and face.  At an abstract level, recruiting addresses a few key challenges:

• Finding the right people. You’re looking for cultural fit, skills and competencies, and knowledge. This process is primarily about evaluating and assessing the right fit between the candidate and the employer.
• Finding enough of the right people. This goal is primarily about scale, volume, and throughput.
• Building the right employment brand. This is primarily about marketing and selling career opportunities, your Employee Net Promoter Score, and the face you show candidates in all stages of the process from career sites to day one onboarding and initial goals.

At first glance, you might be tempted to dismiss the role that learning can play with regard to the first issue, but there are actually a few ways that learning solutions might help. In many industries, organizations are facing serious challenges in finding qualified candidates. It’s one of the dirty little secrets of the recession — even when we were dealing with double-digit unemployment, certain roles went unfilled and certain skills remained quite scarce. This is borne out by anecdotal data as well. In the last few months, I’ve spoken with oil and gas specialists who are un-retiring because of skill and expertise shortages at their former companies. I’ve personally encountered engineering teams in certain fields where the youngest team member is over 40 years old.  Scary stuff.

Given these challenges, a learning solution can provide the features and capabilities to develop skills among employees and candidates. Why not grow your own talent pool by providing an external training portal for the skills and job roles you need most?  While not every job role or skill can be addressed this way, the solution can provide the theoretical and knowledge foundation for success at any level. Moreover, it offers another data point in the evaluation process. Did the candidate avail themselves of the free training you provided?  How did they perform on the assessments in the training? The answers provide valuable Talent Intelligence in the recruiting stage.

A solid learning program can also help drive a better employee Net Promoter Score (NPS) by specifically targeting a central driver of employee satisfaction — investment in employee growth and development. Happier, more satisfied employees attract more employee referrals. And we all know that study after study has shown that referrals are the most effective recruiting source across multiple measures. We also know from network theory that high-performing individuals surround themselves with high-performing colleagues and friends. Network theory also suggests that core beliefs and behaviors (the foundation of cultural fit) will be far more consistent across strong networks and even weak networks than among unconnected individuals. So to recap: world-class training and development leads to higher employee satisfaction and engagement which leads to more employee referrals which leads to better skill, knowledge, and cultural fits.

One final point: getting the employee in the door is really just the first step in a much longer journey to productivity. If those employees leave within 90 days, what have you really accomplished aside from a substantial spend for zero gain? On the question of retention, the evidence is quite clear: learning can have a tremendous impact on both new hire retention challenges and on the retention of experienced personnel. At CKE for example, the learning solution contributed to a 42 percent drop in turnover. This is a fairly common outcome from the implementation of solid training and development practices. And really it should be no surprise. Some of the biggest reasons for quick quits are directly addressed by training: fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) from ignorance and lack of competence; no connection to other employees on the team; and lack of commitment (which is often a response to the company’s lack of commitment to the employee).

On the issue of productivity, again the evidence is quite clear.  Training and learning programs can significantly reduce time to competency. At Fastenal, the learning solution helped them to cut new hire training in half while they simultaneously increased revenue per FTE.  At Linksys, it helped reduce training time per learner from 30 days to 7.  That’s 23 more days of productivity and value-add per new hire.

Summary
Learning can have dramatic impacts on all aspects of recruiting from attracting top tier candidates to throughput to improving "candidate to hire" conversion.  Learning can even be used to "grow your own" talent pools through external training and development offerings for hard-to-fill positions. The evidence is clear – learning solutions can improve the effectiveness and busines impact of recruiting solutions. In the next post in this series, we’ll look at the impact that learning can have on performance management.