Trying to figure out how to train your company’s recruiters? You’re not alone. Many companies struggle with how to best equip their employees with the skills and knowledge they need to be successful. Fortunately, developing a successful recruiter training program is a great way to not only sharpen your recruiters’ skills but gain alignment and clarity around your company’s best practices. While training can be a powerful and transformative tool, it can be packaged and delivered in various forms depending on the needs of your team, so be sure to ask yourself these formative questions before designing your approach:

1. What are the needs of my team?

The most important aspect of training is making sure that it addresses the needs of your team. Without a clear understanding of what your team members need to improve upon, you run the risk of developing content that is either too basic or too advanced. Furthermore, you may end up covering topics that are irrelevant to the day-to-day work of your team members. To avoid these pitfalls, it is essential to consult with your team members and get a sense of what they feel would be most beneficial for them to learn. Only by taking this step can you ensure that your training will be truly effective.

2. What is the purpose of the training?

The purpose of training is to establish a clear understanding of your team’s performance and leverage this data to validate your need for training. This will also help you create learning outcomes, which will enable you to evaluate your team post-training. Something else you might want to think about is whether or not you have established a culture that fosters learning. If learning new skills or attending training has not previously been a given at your company, you will need to set clear expectations. A culture of learning will help ensure that employees are motivated to attend training and see it as a valuable use of their time. It will also help to reduce the barriers that might prevent employees from taking advantage of learning opportunities. Finally, establishing a culture of learning will send a strong message to your team that you are committed to their development and growth.

3. Who is the audience?

The first step in understanding your audience is to segment them into different groups. For example, you might have separate teams for sales and engineering. Within each team, there may be different types of roles that require different recruiting approaches. For example, a sales team may have positions for account managers, sales engineers, and inside sales representatives. Each of these roles requires a different set of skills and experiences, so the recruiting process will be different for each one.

Once you have segmented your audience, you can start to think about what type of content each group would need. For example, a sales team would need content that covers the basics of the sales process, while an engineering team would need content that covers the basics of engineering. The key is to provide the right type of content for each group so that they can effectively do their job.

If you are able to understand and cater to the needs of your different audiences, you will be well on your way to successful recruiting. By segmenting your audience and providing the right type of content for each group, you can ensure that everyone has the information they need to be successful in their role.

4. What will the training look like?

Once you’ve identified your target audience and training objectives, you can begin to create highly tailored content for your training course.

If your learning outcomes focus on being able to apply a concept or skill to the way your team recruits (such as learning how to communicate your company’s story or value proposition), focus on role-playing typical scenarios they might face. If you expect your recruiters to be able to identify profiles of top technical talent post-training, you would want to focus on analyzing what makes a good candidate and having your participants evaluate profiles as an activity.

The length of your training will be dependent on the number of participants and level of interaction you’re expecting as well as the subject matter difficulty. Allow enough time to present, discuss, and practice the content.

5. Are you setting clear expectations?

The first step to answering this question is nailing down what you are actually going to expect from the participants, and next you will need to openly communicate your thoughts. Expectation setting has been identified as the most important aspect of successful training, even ranked before the actual content and training method.

If your recruiters are expected to improve job performance, why? Ideally, you have had an open and honest communication with your employees about performance expectations so that you can build off these conversations and clarify the purpose of the training from their perspective.

Next, spell out your expectations for how recruiters will show up to the training. You will want participants to arrive at the training ready to learn. One thing that we’ve recognized through conducting numerous training sessions is that requiring participants to shut down their phones and laptops is crucial to their engagement with the content. When we invite recruiters to participate in a particular training module, we communicate our expectations to them up front so they can plan accordingly. You will notice a huge difference in the way your participants show up when you set clear expectations from the get-go.

6. How will you evaluate participants post-training?

There are a few key ways to measure the success of participants post-training. The first is to establish clear learning outcomes. What goals do you hope each participant will achieve by the end of the training? Once these goals are clearly defined, you can measure whether or not participants are meeting them. You can also track whether participants are staying aligned with the goals of the training. This can be done through surveys or interviews conducted before and after the training. By gauging participants’ level of satisfaction with the training, you can get a sense of how well they are able to apply what they’ve learned. Finally, it’s important to provide ways for participants to give feedback on the training itself. This feedback can be used to make necessary adjustments to ensure that future training is even more successful.