10
Identifying and Onboarding the Best Talent
I, Sarah Siegel, am a seasoned learning design leader at IBM. Until a quarter of my team retired, and another quarter was “poached” by the commercial part of our organization—with my full cooperation, of course—my team was the most expert one among the several like-missioned teams across the organization. The senior learning designers who reported to me had at least 10 years of experience in the field, and a number had been learning designers for 20 to 30 years.
The team included a mix of learning PhDs and master’s degrees in instructional design. In a couple cases, their experience predated the Internet for commercial use, let alone digital learning. They kept their skills relevant through continuous learning—both because they were self-motivated and because we required it. For example, I asked the entire team to learn how to build a chatbot, because I think of them as 21st-century performance support.
So, when faced with replenishing my team, I knew we had a big task ahead of us, and the new members would have big shoes to fill. This is the story of how we did that.
What Do Job Descriptions for the Next Generation of Learning Experience Designers Include?
The senior learning experience designer and the more junior learning experience designer job descriptions we posted included criteria that were informed by the skills and descriptions listed in our competitors’ web-based job descriptions. To remain competitive in the marketplace, we benchmarked against our competitors to ensure that the talent we were recruiting had relevant skill sets for meeting the future needs for learning.
We noticed that like us, they were looking for learning designers with video production skills. However, what was not explicitly listed in their job descriptions was the ability to educate through storytelling and deliver consumer-grade experiences. By “consumer grade” we mean an experience that feels as smooth, rich, and useful as any platform our learners might use outside the workplace. Our senior learning experience designers would also need to act as consultants and trusted advisors to our portfolio leaders. So, we made sure to interview for all those qualities.
Both roles also required at least five years of experience (eight for the more senior role) as an instructional designer, UX designer, interaction designer, product designer, or similar discipline, as well as proficiency in visual design and video production; copywriting experience was also preferred. In addition, we expected everyone to have a portfolio that showcased their digital and face-to-face learning offerings.
We expected that the learning designers in both the junior and senior roles to be skilled in adult learning principles, effective instructional approaches, needs analysis, Agile methods, education trends, and design thinking. In addition, their learning solutions needed to incorporate best practices in adult learning theory, neuroscience, and leadership.
Requiring candidates to incorporate neuroscience best practices into their learning solutions is fundamental, although our competitors rarely refer to it explicitly. The neuroscience best practices we most commonly leverage are Carol Dweck’s and David Rock’s principles for encouraging a growth mindset in our employees.
Our learning offerings need to be science-based, human-centered, and “sticky” or applicable. For example, our chief leadership, learning, and inclusion officer routinely asks, “Where’s the science behind that?” when we share a diversity and inclusion learning journey, for example. We know to do our homework up front so that we can answer these questions about any offering, journey, or series we design.
Of course, the human-centered, sticky attributes can be more subjective, and we achieve them through employing top learning scientists and learning designers whose work garners awards and excellent net promoter scores (NPS). We use NPS not to measure learning effectiveness, but rather to see how engaging our offerings are.
Comparing our job posts, the senior learning experience designer listed six skills that the more junior role did not include. Senior learning experience designers need to manage stakeholders and subject matter experts in the content development process, ensuring alignment, engagement, and expectation management. They must serve as effective partners for stakeholders and sponsors across the company at all levels, and coach and mentor junior developers in use of tools and instructional design methodologies (Figure 10-1).
Figure 10-1. Comparison of Required Technical and Professional Skills
Senior learning experience designers need to serve as thought leaders and subject matter experts in learning design, as well as scope and estimate the level of effort for project deliverables, applying strong project management discipline for setting expectations, execution, and resolving issues. Finally, they must develop all materials relevant to the program rollout, as shown by the responsibilities in bold in Figure 10-2.
Figure 10-2. Comparison of Required Technical and Professional Responsibilities
So, in looking at these two figures, what skills categories did we seek?
• Outside-in orientation. Curiosity about where workplace learning and learning technology is headed; for example, considering industry peers, ATD, and related organizations’ best practices, and generally keeping an eye out for what’s next.
• Collaboration. Tendency to be team players, rather than lone wolves; for instance, offering examples of succeeding through teamwork and being generous in sharing credit.
• Independence and ownership. Sense of autonomy and accountability for each project; for example, ensuring that their projects were on time and on budget.
• Writing skills. They were imaginative; for example, creating compelling stories and writing engaging, scenario-based assessments.
• Creativity and innovation. For example, one of the candidates created a clever course that included gamification called “Night of the Learning Dead.”
• Business results. Measuring the impact of the learning solutions they designed; for example, shorter customer service calls through better performance support and the associated savings per rep.
• Agile. They included sponsor users and designed iteratively; for example, releasing the essential all-manager version of a course, followed by the essential all-employee version, and then fleshing out a couple modules for each post-launch.
How Did We Interview Promising Candidates?
The team interviewed 16 candidates for the learning designer and senior learning designer roles. Eight made it to the second round of interviews. One requirement we had of candidates was that they lived in proximity to one of our hubs around the country, because we believe in co-location for collaboration.
We were looking to fill experience and diversity gaps on our team, so we strategically planned to mitigate bias in hiring as follows:
• Every candidate replied to the same core questions and we had a series of skills categories, in which we scored the examples they shared on a 1 to 3 scale (1=low and 3=high).
• The first-round interview with each candidate was done by two people (most often by WebEx). Any candidate who advanced to the second round was interviewed by my manager and me. The pairs of interviewers always included a current senior learning experience designer or stakeholder. I was the leader to whom the candidate would be reporting.
We nearly hired one of the premier candidates. The person was affable and skilled, and we all felt akin with them. However, after the second round of interviews, my management and I realized the candidate was too similar to the rest of the team in experience and demography. I was startled that we came so close to offering the candidate a position, despite all our bias mitigation tactics. Ultimately, we told the candidate that while their experience was deep, the team needed designers with different experiences, especially in their ability to design consumer-grade digital learning.
We had three positions open, and we offered them to a total of six candidates. We got there too late with one of them—another firm had snapped her up. That was a big lesson learned: Don’t linger in what appears to be a strong market for job seekers. Two candidates came back and told us that their management had made counteroffers they couldn’t refuse. Having that experience cemented our impression that it was a candidate’s job market. Fortunately, three of the candidates accepted with pleasure—two were new hires and the third transferred to us from a different department in the company.
Our company culture heavily promotes continuous learning, especially to ensure that our current workforce can upskill itself and successfully self-reinvent. With that focus in mind, we took a calculated risk with a learning designer and transferred in a recent graduate of our HR Leadership Development Program (HRLDP).
HRLDP is a cohort of our highest-potential HR professionals. We calculated the risk and determined it wasn’t giant for three reasons. The candidate:
• was an HRLDP graduate
• had created memorable informal learning experiences across Latin America
• came from a country that was among our company’s most successful last year.
We figured that the current team could learn best practices from him and that his experience would in turn complement theirs.
Our Six Hiring Tips
Based on our experiences in hiring for the team, we offer six tips:
• Work with a premier talent acquisition professional. Our company is large enough that we have them on staff. They pulled the best of the applications and pre-interviewed them for us. If any were promising, they were recommended for a first interview.
• If you’re with a smaller firm, bear in mind that you are closer to the ground on what you need, which is a good thing. Remember, even great recruiters are not necessarily experts in the learning space. So as the manager, you’ll need to do an additional level of screening after the recruiter.
• Networking and always building a pipeline of potential candidates as a manager is key. Managers can’t fully rely on recruiters and should always be recruiting too. For example, I keep in contact with my best professors from my graduate program, and they inform the pipeline for earlier-career hiring.
• When we met candidates, we asked the outside-in question first. One candidate for the learning experience designer role said they used Quora and Reddit for reference, as well as doing more traditional research. We liked hearing that they looked for workplace learning and learning technology trends in modern sites that rely on crowdsourcing. Of course, we expect our learning designers to be excellent at traditional research, but modern designers need to make use of modern tools.
• Being with a mature company can be a selling point. Your candidate will join a strong design community. When we talked with candidates about collaboration, independence, and ownership, several said they were craving collaboration opportunities and spoke of nearly total independence and ownership in their current roles—necessarily, because they were all working in startups.
• If you are hiring three or more learning designers at once, and your company has a continuous learning culture, consider building organizational capability with an internal transfer who comes from a learning-adjacent role. Fill one of the more junior roles with someone who has proven to be high potential and has succeeded in prior learning-adjacent assignments. What do we mean by “learning-adjacent”? We mean, for example, a diversity and inclusion stint where the candidate produced live, large-scale employee events that would qualify as informal learning experiences when looked at through the learning lens.
How Did We Onboard the Candidates Who Accepted Our Offer?
We had a terrific way to onboard learning professionals—or so we thought. I designed a moment-by-moment learning plan for our new hires’ first week. The learning plan included our leaders’ all-hands replays, all-IBMer required courses, resources on design, links to training on the authoring tools and our learning experience platform, and learning activities focused on diversity and inclusion. It was action packed!
I chose a mix of content because I wanted them to succeed fast. And I included Diversity & Inclusion offerings because inclusion and inclusiveness are among our culture’s values. New hires needed to see that they made a good decision in joining us; just look at all the resources they had at their fingertips!
The learning plan had a confident name too: “Success Accelerator for IBM Learning Experience Designers.” I even created a companion agenda with a bit of context for the activities (Figure 10-3).
Figure 10-3. Day 4 Agenda for a New IBM Learning Experience Designer
Of all the lessons learned in this chapter, some of the biggest emerged during the onboarding process. Chief among them was that during a new employee’s first week, learning is a two-way process—that is, if you did a good job with hiring and you’re a willing listener. It’s vital to get feedback from your new hires. You hired them for a reason!
The week 1 agenda included daily debriefs with their manager (me) to check in and hear impressions of what the new employees were learning and answer any questions. By day 3, when we connected on a videoconference call, Liz, the newest employee, looked discouraged. Could she possibly be the same person who showed up on day 1 with a smile full of shining optimism?
“I feel like I’m a bit behind,” Liz said. “I’m not sure how best to prioritize my learning.”
As Liz described the impact of my action-packed plan, I realized I may have tried too hard. I’d wanted to equip our new learning designers for success and give them everything they would need all in one place. However, in this case “everything” was the problem. We talked further, and Liz kindly offered to send me an alternative of how it could have been designed more effectively.
I am glad she felt safe enough to make the offer. Perhaps she did so because the day prior, I had assigned an IBM Archives podcast in which Thomas Watson Jr. addressed University of Pennsylvania students on the importance of conflict in design. Liz brought it up, saying how happy she was that he thought conflict was part of the mix in good design.
Maybe Liz also felt safe because I had been inclusive and encouraging up to that point and had also said that in my experience at IBM, good ideas were welcome, and their implementation was always a question of when, not if. Whatever inspired her, Liz went for it, and she is the author of the onboarding analysis and tips that follow here.
Onboarding Rebooted: A Prototype for the Week 1 Learning Experience Based on Three Days at IBM
By Elizabeth Huttner-Loan
How might we offer an onboarding experience that helps a new team member acquire essential knowledge, complete procedures, and connect with key team members, while also allowing the new team member to have agency in terms of spending more time on certain pieces of training and meeting an approved personal goal?
There are a few key questions we should ask:
• What is really essential? I can only answer from my extremely limited perspective.
• What is the right balance of read and watch versus activity-based training? That will vary by learner.
• How can we prompt the new team member to save content they will likely need in the future? Should we just put this content together, or would it be better to invite the learner to compile it in a way that makes the most sense for them?
• Who are the stakeholders for this learning experience? Can we make the stakeholders transparent to the new team member? It would be helpful to know more about the ecosystem.
• How can the new team member collect and share reflections on their learning experience?
• What kind of data should we collect about how the new team member approaches the orientation experience and outcomes after completion? What are the options for collecting this data?
I’ve noticed that there are different activity categories in the onboarding experience. However, there is overlap between them, and it would be possible to categorize them differently (Figure 10-4).
Figure 10-4. Categories and Descriptions of Onboarding Experiences
Flow of Onboarding Experiences Over Week 1
These suggestions reflect a choice to have a more logistics-focused day 1 and a lighter schedule (Figure 10-5). We want to make sure the new team member connects with the manager as needed.
Key differences from the original flow include:
• There is time throughout to allow the new hire autonomy to schedule a quick meeting when needed. This is something I wanted. For instance, I had a colleague offer to sit down with me to explain some logistics.
• In general, there’s more time for the new team member to reflect.
• Day 1 accounts for a long setup phase and focuses on IBM as a whole rather than drilling down.
Figure 10-5. Onboarding Experience Categories With Time Percentages
• Day 2 has more of a focus on getting IBM requirements out of the way and introducing our organization’s mission.
• Role-specific work doesn’t truly start until day 3. This is to make the onboarding process less overwhelming.
Much of the material from the original flow fits, but a few things will need to shift to week 2. I think it could be a good opportunity to revisit the concept of “essential,” specifically for week 1. How can we make it even clearer what’s absolutely essential for week 1?
Summary
Successfully hiring and onboarding learning professionals involves finding designers with consumer-grade skills to amplify and complement your current team’s experience, especially when the team is educating through storytelling and scenarios. In our experience, you can help mitigate bias by using the same interviewing format for all candidates. Then you can pause and ask yourself if your favorite candidates complement the team’s skills and diversity. If not, think twice before hiring them. Finally, listen to your new employees’ points of view. If you did a good job hiring, they can take your mission to new heights.
It is our hope that learning from my team-rebuilding challenge and Liz’s onboarding odyssey helps learning leaders at organizations of any size hire the best learning designers and avoid onboarding pitfalls. We were glad to share IBM’s job descriptions for the next generation of learning designers, along with how we succeeded in finding candidates with the skills we needed, how we mitigated bias in our candidate interviews and hiring, and how we onboarded them, as well as how we might have done so even more effectively! We hope you appreciate the tips and encourage you to adapt them to your own environment.
Key Takeaways
The knowledge and skills needed by learning practitioners to excel today and be future-ready are much more varied than in the past and include the science of learning, design thinking, and understanding the ways technologies can support and enable learning.
When a learning-team member suggests a new concept or solution, the leader might ask, “What does the science [of learning] say about the effectiveness of this approach?”
While most organizations have a unique recruiting and onboarding process, it is important to periodically benchmark with other companies to have a firsthand glimpse of what they do.
Questions for Reflection and Further Action
1. What processes does your learning team employ to ensure new hires can significantly enhance the overall team skills and portfolio?
2. How might you incorporate some of the ideas from the process and lessons learned in this case study?
3. How frequently does your team review and update the descriptions you use to hire new learning practitioners?