SocialTalent - Your multitool for enabling, transforming, upskilling and reskilling your Talent Acquisition and Hiring Teams!

Although in the past, Learning and Development within Talent Acquisition has been often taken a bit lightly by many organisations, the relevance of upskilling/reskilling and enabling the TA teams has tremendously gained importance due to the industry shift in the last 12 months. 

For this reason, we have decided to take a closer look at Social Talent in our two-part article about how to pick and implement HR & TA technology. If you haven’t read part one yet, we encourage you to do so here, as it provides a general framework for running such a project. 

In this article, we will share with you a practical example of how SocialTalent can be implemented in an organisation, once you decide to go for it. But first things first. 

What is SocialTalent? 

SocialTalent is an e-learning platform that helps TA professionals, hiring teams and leaders to upskill and reskill through bite-sized video content. The platform is accessible 24/7, offering a vast amount of content from world-class experts worldwide. Additionally, it functions as an LMS (Learning Management System), allowing users to add their own content and fully customise learning journeys for their organisation. One of the platform's biggest benefits is the flexibility it provides to learners, who can now decide when to learn based on their own schedule.

There are many ways you can use SocialTalent in a team and organisation. The approach described below is just one of them and covers a holistic strategy that caters to different learners, including Talent Acquisition (such as Employer Branding, Sourcers, and Coordinators) and Hiring Team members (e.g., Hiring Managers and Interviewers).       

While Social Talent offers multiple solutions, this overview will focus on one specific approach that incorporates their content library and LMS functions.     

Where to start? 

The very first step is to discover and define the problem. Let's assume that you and your team have discovered that there are some significant gaps when it comes to upskilling,  enablement and training of your TA and Hiring Teams regarding hiring topics and best practices. 

As a result, you have defined the following use cases with their requirements and have decided to search for a solution that can help you solve this problem:  

1. Upskilling the Talent Acquisition Team (strong must-have) 

The tool should be able to help us upskill our TA team. Ideally, it would be an all-in-one solution that is fast to integrate into our workflows and easy to use. The tool should also already have the relevant high-level content around Talent Acquisition, including other relevant topics such as Recruitment Operations, Employer Branding, Technical Sourcing and more, so that we wouldn’t need to spend additional time and resources on content acquisition, creation, and/or production, but make it available right away to our learners.  

2. Upskilling the Hiring Team Members (must-have) 

It will be the same use case described in bullet point no 1, but we will include the content that is relevant also for the Hiring Team members, such as Hiring Managers and Interviewers.

3. Enabling the TA and the Hiring Team members (must-have) 

The tool should have functionality of an LMS, where the learning content and journeys can be tailored, adjusted, and modified based on the specific needs of the learner groups. Additionally, users should be able to add their own content to the learning journeys.  

Now, let's make another assumption that, after aligning on the use cases, goals, success metrics, and the timeline, you have completed the research, evaluation and testing of various tools, and as a final step, you have decided to go with SocialTalent. As the details regarding these steps are available in Part 1 of our article, we will skip them here to save your time. Instead, we will describe how you can integrate SocialTalent into your organisation based on the defined use cases. We highly recommend working closely with the SocialTalent team from the beginning, as they will be able to advise on best practices and provide support regarding the platform's functionality        

Social Talent for Talent Acquisition

Up- and / or reskilling 

SocialTalent is a powerful tool for upskilling or reskilling your Talent Acquisition (TA) team. The platform provides access to the latest training content from global TA and Human Resources (HR) experts. Additionally, it offers pre-crafted learning paths, backed by certificates, making it a scalable plug-and-play solution for Learning and Development (L&D) within the TA market.

By creating structured learning paths and programs, you can reach learners of different groups and seniority levels, such as Sourcers, Recruiters, Coordinators, Team Leads, etc. These programs help provide a clear understanding of the knowledge needed for various roles and levels, as well as how to acquire this knowledge. If you have a performance model in your TA organisation, we recommend integrating these learning paths and programs into the growth and career progression mechanisms for each role.

In other words, these learning paths can be used to upskill team members seeking to advance in seniority or to reskill those considering a lateral move into a new role (for example, moving from a Sourcer to a Recruiter role).

Enablement

SocialTalent's true versatility as a multi-tool is highlighted by the ability to add your own content to the platform and incorporate it into your learning programs, thereby making it readily available to your organisation. This feature, which might seem minor at first glance, greatly enhances your enablement mechanism, particularly when your teams are scaling.

For example, if you have recruiters transitioning from commercial to tech talent acquisition, you could design a customised learning pathway. This could include enablement content like in-house training videos to guide them on hiring for tech roles. You can either use the content already available on SocialTalent and organise it into a single learning path or combine it with your in-house enablement content.

Another instance could be when you intend to introduce a new process or tech tool to your team. To familiarise them with this change, you might want to use your own organisation-specific enablement content. Creating a specific learning path for it and assigning it to your team will ensure this content is quickly and easily accessible to them, allowing them to engage with it at their own convenience and pace.

Onboarding

Just as it is effective for enablement, SocialTalent can also be extremely beneficial for onboarding, particularly when dealing with a significant number of new hires during team expansion. The same approach of structured learning paths applies, but there's a stronger focus on custom learning paths and proprietary in-house content, rather than relying solely on the SocialTalent library.

For this use case, you might want to consider not just adding content for the new hires to read, but also creating specific steps they need to complete. This could include, among others, engaging onboarding videos from existing team members. These resources can help newcomers understand your company culture, processes, and everything else they need for a successful start.

In practice, this could mean creating a learning path dedicated solely to onboarding content, and then assigning this learning path to new joiners once they've started their roles.

SocialTalent for Hiring Teams 

Just as using SocialTalent can significantly impact Talent Acquisition, utilising it to train and upskill your hiring managers and interviewers could dramatically improve the efficiency and quality of your hiring process, as well as the overall candidate experience. One of the most effective ways to achieve this is by creating dedicated learning paths for your hiring managers and interviewers. The objective should not only be to equip them with the dos and don’ts of hiring and interviewing, but also to elevate their understanding of best hiring practices. We suggest establishing two separate learning paths – one for hiring managers and another for interviewers. These should be completed whenever an employee is about to assume a hiring manager or interviewer role, or joins your company in these positions. In essence, they would need to complete the relevant learning path before they can initiate a hiring process for their team or interview candidates, in addition to any other steps expected by your organisation, such as shadowing/reverse-shadowing interviews. These learning paths may incorporate content from the SocialTalent library, as well as specific enablement content from your organisation, if you have standardised procedures that need to be adhered to by the hiring team. Furthermore, if your hiring processes for tech and non-tech roles differ, we recommend that this is reflected in the design of the learning paths to make them as customised as possible.

Rollout and Communication 

When planning your program rollout and communication around it, there are two fundamental things to keep in mind, especially if you are operating in a larger organisation where such a program might affect a larger audience. First of all, starting to use any new process or tool means changing people's behaviour. For this reason, we would encourage you to apply one of the change management methodologies (e.g. ADKAR, Kotter's 8-Step model, etc.) when planning the rollout. Second, make it easy and understandable for your audience to see what SocialTalent is and how to use it in your organisation. 

For the larger and more complex organisations, we recommend starting with pilot projects involving various audiences, where applicable, and then rolling out SocialTalent in smaller batches. This approach will allow you to learn from your target audience and make necessary program adjustments quickly.     

The communication surrounding the rollout is essential. Therefore, we suggest creating a clear and structured plan for the rollout, along with an attached communication plan. Proactively sharing the rollout plan with your team will help eliminate uncertainty in the process and ensure that your team members are aware of what to expect and what is expected from them.      

Here are a few additional ways that you can apply to make sure your audience and organisation are well informed: 

• Internal (web) page: Depending on which platform your organisation uses, you can create an internal landing page with the information about what SocialTalent is, how it is being applied in your organisation, and how to use it. Don’t forget to include the contact information of the project manager/team as well.
• Proactive reach-out: Reach out proactively to the new joiners and current employees who are eligible for the SocialTalent program, and share with them information about SocialTalent and how to get started with it.    
• Onboarding material: Add information about SocialTalent (and a link to your internal page) to the onboarding material for your new joiners.  

Making The Most out of Learning Paths

Learning Paths are a powerful feature of SocialTalent. Here are a few additional tips on how to make the most out of them:  

Set (realistic) goals

When designing your Learning Paths, start with your end goal and work backwards. For example, if you want your learners to complete a Learning Path with approximately 4 hours of content, it might take them around 2 months, assuming learners spend an average of 30 minutes per week on learning. Therefore, when launching a Learning Path, try to connect it to a specific time frame and encourage learners to dedicate a specific amount of time to learning each week.

Diversify your content

Although SocialTalent’s most powerful feature is its video content library, if you’re using the platform as a LMS with customised content and Learning Paths, don’t be afraid to diversify your content and go beyond videos. While videos are great, you can also add links to articles, internal documents, other external videos, and to-do’s. This will help you create a more diverse and engaging learning journey for your learners.    

Keep an eye on the progress data 

Once you have launched your Learning Paths, we encourage you to monitor the progress of your teams through the reporting feature. This will help you better understand if the learners are actively using SocialTalent and whether they are on track with their progress.   

Involve domain experts (where possible) 

This is especially relevant in the case of large-scale and complex organisations with a high level of specialisation and specific internal processes. For example, when creating a Learning Path on a specific topic, such as DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion), it is advisable to involve an internal domain expert for alignment. In this case it could be a DEI Manager if your organisation has one. In general, we also recommend aligning with your L&D (Learning & Development) team, if available in your organisation.           

Create and Nurture a Learning Culture

No matter how good your tools and programs are, if learning is not a core value and an integral part of your culture, then it will be very difficult to achieve any goals when it comes to learning and development within your organisation. Here is how to create one:   

Lead by example

Once the program has been rolled out, make sure that you, as a program manager, and the leadership across your organisation lead by example and use SocialTalent regularly for learning. 

Appreciate and value learning 

Once your team has started learning with SocialTalent, make sure that you appreciate and value their learning progress. One of the simplest ways to do this - is to regularly highlight your most active learners to their teams and encourage them through positive reinforcement.  

Make learning a habit   

The most challenging part of continuous learning is developing it into a habit. Learning Champions and Learning Circles can help you with this. Learning Champions are the most active learners in your organisation who advocate for SocialTalent and inspire the rest of the teams when it comes to learning through SocialTalent. Learning Circles are group discussion sessions, usually held on a monthly or weekly basis, curated by the Learning Champions. Each session usually focuses on one specific topic that is part of the learning program.      

Collect the feedback and measure the success 

Last but not least, collect feedback about the SocialTalent program and measure its success. One of the easiest ways to collect feedback is to integrate a feedback survey as the last item in the Learning Path. Additionally, monthly feedback surveys can be sent to the teams to gauge their general sentiments regarding learning and development. It is highly important not to forget to directly ask the learners from time to time about how they are doing with SocialTalent. This will help you understand what keeps the teams from learning and, ideally, solve these obstacles for them.  

This is it - thank you so much for making it til the end! We hope you've enjoyed this reading and that it will spark some great ideas on how to use SocialTalent in your organisation. 

Please share your thoughts on this topic by leaving a comment or reaching out directly to Valeria Stanga or me. PS! Check out also our Part 1 and Part 2: The GoodTime Edition of this article.

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