Testing: the heart of effective recruiter training

2.5 million gigabytes. That’s the ballpark of how much information the human brain can hold. It’s a huge amount of mental data. And a fact you’ll probably forget by the time you reach the end of this post.

When it comes to new information and skills, capacity isn’t the problem. We can, in theory, remember almost everything that we learn, year after year. But why would we? As human beings, we naturally declutter our minds over time – and if information isn’t relevant to us, it’ll disappear for good.

In recruiter training, this is a major challenge. What’s the point of investing time and money into training when a large amount of information won’t stick? Why sacrifice time that could be spent on candidates and clients if new skills and ideas won’t turn into action?

The answer isn’t in the style and quality of the training itself (although that helps!). It’s in what happens next.

1. The challenge of forgetting

   Think back to the very first piece of professional training you took part in. Even if you can remember the event, there’s a good chance you don’t remember much of the content.

   From the moment a training session comes to an end, we start tossing away everything we’ve learned with reckless abandon. Intentionally or not, forgetting is the enemy of engaged, constantly developing recruiters – and most information will be forgotten in the first few days.

   There are practical ways to combat this, including:

   • Training that emphasises context and real-world scenarios where information can be applied
   • Bringing a social dimension to your training – people tend to remember shared experiences
   • Repeating the important ideas across multiple touchpoints – not just a single course, but all your training content

   However, the single most impactful way to help recruiters retain information is a single word that scares almost all of us: test.

   Testing is training

   The word ‘test’ tends to bring back memories of school exams, stress, and frustration. Culturally, that’s how we’re trained to view testing: as a moment of critical importance, where you’ll either pass or fail with no ability to undo your mistakes.

   The reality couldn’t be more different. Testing isn’t the benchmark of whether training was effective. It’s a vital opportunity to take that training to the next level.

   According to Scientific American, retrieving information is a more powerful memory event than storing that information in the first place. It’s the process of pulling information back out that helps it stick – and embeds those ideas into that all-important long-term memory.

   Of course, even the idea of a test could be off-putting to busy recruiters who aren’t looking for another source of stress. That’s where a fun, flexible way of delivering your training and testing comes in.

   How Juice handles testing

   The Juice platform isn’t just full of engaging, bite-sized content for recruiters – it’s designed to turn that content into new skills and better performance.

   Testing is at the heart of how this works, but not through the kind of formal tests recruiters hate. Instead, we’ve made testing central to every aspect of the platform. It’s there in the quick reviews at the end of our courses. It’s there in the gamified quizzes. And it’s there in the way we encourage recruiters to constantly review and reflect on what they’ve learned.

   As a result, your recruiters aren’t just completing courses and moving on. They’re genuinely learning techniques and best practice that they can apply out in the real world.

   See how our recruiter training platform works