Use an LMS to On-Board Campus Recruits- 6 Reasons Why it Works Better
Reducing the time required by a new employee to learn the ropes and hit the ground running is a challenge for any overloaded HR manager in today’s corporate world. If you’ve done campus recruitment before, you know how messy it is.
Not only do you need to ‘upskill’ these new employees, you also need to make sure they have a clear idea of your company’s policies and expectations. Apart from this, you need to give them a detailed description of their responsibilities and an introduction to the company history, professional ethics code, customer service guidelines, work harassment laws, safety rules, legal compliance requirements, etc.
Most companies use instructor-led training (classroom training) and reading material such as Word documents and PowerPoint presentations to achieve their goals. This is often part of their induction programs.
But it is tedious and time-consuming. Tedious because one needs to manually send out online and offline reading material to each and every employee, and time-consuming because of stretched out, 8–9 hours long, classroom training sessions.
If you are still using a similar strategy, it’s time to switch to something more effective.
The first step is to change your strategy, use an LMS
A learning management system (LMS) allows you to create, distribute and track training. Moreover, with the right learning management system, engaging fresh hires — while reducing onboarding and training costs — is a part of the package.
Here is how an LMS will accelerate your onboarding process:
Reusable Content
Being reusable and automated, creating onboarding content only incurs a one-time cost. Content can then be maintained and updated whenever needed. Moreover, employees might need to refer to certain pieces of content again in the future. Use a cloud-based LMS to make the content available anywhere, anytime in an easily accessible format.
Flexible Training
You may want to assign different onboarding modules to employees with different roles. Doing this is next to impossible with traditional, offline onboarding programs. Use an LMS’s web-based infrastructure to assign tailored modules to different employee groups. For eg. Assign courses on safety to an employee who is a part of the manufacturing team rather than assigning it to someone in accounting.
Reduced Expenses
Unlike traditional classroom-based onboarding programs, LMS-enabled programs don’t require instructors, scheduled classes, transportation, and other similar expenses. In fact, the same onboarding program can be served from your LMS platform to employees spread across the globe.
Detailed Progress Reports
In offline induction programs, one usually has no means of tracking progress being made by an employee in a particular course. An LMS enables you to monitor progress in real-time. You can filter out employees who are lagging behind and even push out reminder emails to them.
Asynchronous Learning
Use an LMS to minimize business downtime and boost employee satisfaction. An LMS will allow your new employees to take an onboarding course at their own pace, while still getting on with everything else that they have to do during their probation period. You could even assign courses as part of pre-joining learning requirements, one-two weeks prior to their joining dates. This way the employees can post to their respective departments on day 1, rather than spending too much time in the HR department.
Test and Assessments
What good is an onboarding program if you can’t tell if new employees are actually learning? You can make them watch countless videos or have them read as many documents as you want, but you won’t know if people are learning unless you evaluate their knowledge.
Use an LMS to create, assign, and track quizzes. Doing so will help you determine if each employee understands the material. It will also help you identify whether your onboarding modules are not as effective as you want them to be.
In Summary
Using an inefficient method to onboard employees chews up a lot of time and money. It is not noticeable at first, but if you add investments for each new employee, indirect expenses suffered because of poorly onboarded employees, and costs that come with losing demotivated employees, you’ll see how much time & money you’re wasting. Get an LMS and you’ll immediately cut back on all that.
