Why Recruitment Qualifications Don’t Work

Let me tell you a story.

I recently spoke to a recruitment director who invested quite a lot of money with a trade association to secure qualifications in recruitment. I asked him how good it was, and his response was as follows…

He told me that he worked in executive search but that in the recruitment exam, there were questions about low-level temporary recruitment and temporary employment legislation. He said he had to study intensively to learn these things even though they had no relevance to him or his business and never would have.

I then asked him what he’d learned from his studies that he could turn into money. His face was a picture-in fact he just raised an eyebrow and smiled!

So what’s the point of recruitment qualifications?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not having a go at recruitment trade associations. They offer tremendous value via template terms and conditions, legal helplines, lobbying government, adding credibility to employers via trade association membership logos and a whole lot more. And of course, they provide some very good live training.

My point is that qualifications for qualifications sake are unlikely to dramatically improve the performance of your recruiters. Surely, you should be equipping your staff with the best recruitment techniques tailored to your business?

There’s so much to learn in this job at any level.

When you first begin, you’ve got to learn how to sell professionally, how to ask effective questions and draw a prospect down a pathway to work with your organization. You need to learn recruitment sales, objection handling, how to close clients for exclusivity or retainers, how to win business without cold calling, how to use LinkedIn effectively, and how to maximize LinkedIn InMails and connection requests plus a huge amount more.

The last time I wanted to study for study’s sake was when I was at university. Nowadays, anything I want to learn within the workplace has to make me money or make me more efficient and more successful. Don’t you?

So, is there a better way to train your recruiters and managers? And are recruitment qualifications worth the paper they are written on?

There is no doubt that one benefit of qualifications is that people studying for those qualifications will work harder because they want to pass the exam. So, yes, testing does have a part to play. In fact, I used to advocate this myself when inducting trainees because when new starters believe that they will be assessed rigorously at the end of their induction, they are far more likely to work hard.

However, there is a better way in today’s world.

We’ve developed a unique software and methodology that now assesses proof of knowledge on autopilot, tailored to your business. In a nutshell, whether it’s your live training, videos, PDFs, employment legislation, sector terminology, sales knowledge, or anything else, that you need to staff to learn and master within your business, you can secure proof of knowledge learned far easier than you might imagine.

In one business that I worked with recently, we fast-tracked six trainees with some of them billing in week five and one of them making three placements in the first seven weeks at decent fees.

How did we manage to achieve this?

The answer is that the trainees knew they had to prove the extent of the knowledge to us at the end of the week, and the beauty of it was that we didn’t need to get them to present face-to-face or to have the expense of marking exams – and nor did they do an easily guessable multiple-choice test (which by the way are a terrible way to assess proof of knowledge) as it was all handled through the unique software methodology.

So, do recruitment qualifications work or not?

YES: If you want a qualification and logo on your business card or LinkedIn profile

NO:  If you want your staff to learn everything necessary to become a top performing recruiter in your business.

www.RecruitmentTraining.com is a leading provider of recruitment training, offering over 700 industry videos that aim to enhance the skills of every recruiter in your business and acquire the best recruitment-specific management techniques. Through a recruitment-specific Learning Management System, you can efficiently manage all learning within your organization while benefiting from unique learning accountability tools that promote the effective implementation of knowledge. To explore further, simply click the ‘Show Me How‘ button below.