Marketing professionals bring their skills and expertise to every job, but still require training to integrate themselves into the team. Every new hire needs time to learn a company’s unique systems and structures. However, your training programs shouldn’t drag on forever.
If it takes too long to train new marketing team members, it’s possible that your training program isn’t optimized to produce your training goals, you’re spending too much time on the wrong things, or you’ve hired the wrong people. Here are some ways to address all of these potentials:
1. Recognize the reason new hires fail
Some people believe new hires that take forever to train reflect a poor training system. While that’s sometimes true, it’s not always the case. Data collected from 5,247 hiring managers over a three-year period tell a different story.
A three-year study by Leadership IQ found that 26% of new hires fail because they are unable to accept feedback, 23% fail because they are poor at managing emotions, 17% fail due to lack of motivation, 15% fail due to having the wrong temperament for the job, and 11% fail because they lack the appropriate technical skills.
This study suggests the majority of new hires fail because they were never a match to begin with. You can mitigate this potential with rigorous interviews.
2. Start by refining your interview process
The best way to train new hires faster is to refine your interview process and stop hiring candidates that aren’t a match. Training is inherently time-consuming, but it takes much longer to train people who aren’t a match from the start.
The problem with most interview processes is they don’t probe deeply enough to identify a potential mismatch beyond the realm of technical qualifications. For example, say you interview a brilliant Facebook ad campaign manager. Their portfolio proves their expertise, so you bring them on board and start training them in your company’s methodology. They do exceptionally well until they learn they’ll need to collaborate with the company’s head copywriter.
It’s late in the game to discover your Facebook ad manager isn’t a team player. Can you train them to collaborate with your head copywriter? Absolutely, but how much time will that take? How much money will you need to invest in training your new hire in the art of collaboration – a skill many other equally qualified candidates already have?
The ability to collaborate is a skill you can screen for during the interview process by asking questions about how a person works. A candidate might be brilliant, but if they don’t operate in alignment with your team’s flow, their training will be slow and arduous.
3. Broadcast and archive your training sessions
For a training program to reach its full potential, it needs to be ongoing and ever-evolving. One way to provide ongoing training is to host live training sessions and make them available online for those who can’t make it live. Broadcasting training events is especially helpful when your marketing team is spread out across the world through remote teams.
If you don’t have high tech video equipment, you can still live stream your training sessions with a simple tripod from Amazon and the Beam mobile video recording app. The benefit to using Beam is the backend automation. Beam automatically encrypts and uploads your training sessions, and allows you and your team to notate video segments. The best part? Say a team member has an issue that requires help. You can train them on the spot and film it with Beam, and archive that video as a training session made available to your entire team.
When you can provide short video training sessions for common problems, your new hires will be fully trained in far less time than usual.
4. Don’t focus so much on policies and procedures
An effective training program should produce team members who accurately represent the company’s vision and policies through their work. To accomplish this, you need to train new hires on how to embody your brand, but you don’t want to focus too much on policies.
Most training is boring for new hires; everyone knows when their trainer is just going through the motions. Focus on training that will empower your new hires to embody the company brand and be more effective. For example, train your email marketing manager in the specific communication style you want to impart to your contacts.
Training time is precious
Don’t waste time training new hires in-depth on policies they can simply read and sign off on. If you don’t train them thoroughly in the beginning, you’ll need to retrain them later. Training time is precious; make sure you use it wisely.
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