n today's rapidly evolving job market, upskilling is necessary. According to Gartner's 2023 HR Trends and Priorities report, a third of the skills necessary for a job in 2019 will no longer be relevant by 2024. This trend is not limited to job seekers; even recruiters must adapt to the evolving job market. Some of the most sought-after skills of a recruiter in 2023 include management, sales and communication skills, according to LinkedIn. 

So, how can recruiters stay ahead of the curve? One answer is eLearning. Online learning offers a flexible and immersive platform for employees to deepen their existing skills and acquire new ones.

While this sparks our excitement, mandatory training can sometimes feel dull and uninspiring to employees, especially recruiters who are time-poor and working towards tight deadlines. 

The solution? Learning that is engaging, enjoyable and inclusive. Here's how to do it.

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#1 - Take a learning-in-the-flow-of-work approach 

Learning in the flow of work is an approach that integrates training seamlessly into your employee's daily routines to minimize disruption and frustration. By embedding learning into existing work platforms and rhythms, you will enhance your recruiter’s work rather than interrupting it, giving them more flexibility in learning. This could be your recruiters using a spare 10 minutes in their day to log onto your learning platform or your team leader weaving in micro-learning moments through a quiz in your next team meeting. Enticing, right? 

Ways to encourage learning in the flow of work:

• Break down longer learning courses into 10-15 minute bite-sized learning moments to cover a single concept or process. This allows your recruiters to dip in and out of learning throughout the day on their terms. 
• Encourage your learners to share their knowledge to further embed learning into your culture and ways of working. Recruiters could create a short video showing a demo or build a course to share best practices so other colleagues can benefit from their knowledge.
• Choose an eLearning platform, like HowToo, that is easily accessible to all employees on different devices, is intuitive to use and allows you to track learner engagement. You want a learning platform to do the heavy lifting so you can focus on creating great content.

#2 - Design courses that are visually pleasing and engaging

Visual design is the key to attracting your learners' attention and encouraging greater engagement. How can pretty pictures and coloured fonts be that important? Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that 90% of information is transmitted to the brain visually. Pretty cool. But beautifully designed learning doesn't just make content easier to process; it also makes the content more exciting for the learner. This is imperative to grab the attention of time-poor recruiters. 

There are many ways to create beautiful, branded learning content that won't require a professional designer. Aligning your course content to your company brand is a great place to start. Try weaving your brand colours, logo, images and font into your learning academy to ensure brand consistency and recognition across all your learning content. Another simple way to keep your employees visually engaged is by using mixed media. Think gifs, infographics, images, videos and even voice recordings. The important thing is to ensure your media aligns with your content and isn't just a space filler. 

When creating learning, something else to think about is how you visually structure the content. If you're still delivering training via a Word document, PDF or PowerPoint, it's time to step it up and convert this into interactive eLearning modules. By building your training in an eLearning platform, you can create digital courses in less than 10 minutes with fun elements like dragging and dropping, clicking to reveal, answering questions, and more. We wrote a whole ebook on it if you want to learn more.

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#3 -  Add some fun to your learning with gamification

Gamification is a learning design technique that aims to increase learners' motivation and engagement by applying game design elements to eLearning. Sounds fun. It's also a great way to spark friendly competition, which is a sure way to engage busy recruiters who operate in a candidate-competitive world. Using gamification techniques is a proven way to drive results too. Data from 65 studies with over 6000 trainees found those using video games had a higher skill and factual knowledge level and an increased retention rate than those in comparison groups.

Ways to use gamification in your learning content:

• Mini games are a fun way to weave in activities throughout your content to test learners' knowledge or to add a joyful interaction. Mini games could include a time-based quiz or a virtual scavenger hunt. 
• Points and incentives can be a nice sweetener for encouraging healthy office competition and rewarding your most engaged and active learners. This might look like a digital badge your learners can share on LinkedIn, office privileges or physical prizes. 
• For something more complex, try branching scenarios where the learner follows a realistic storyline, asking them to make decisions based on how they act. This is a valuable gamification tool to guide your learners through complex scenarios.

#4 - Create courses for diversity, inclusion and accessibility

One of the best ways to engage recruitment teams with learning is to make it accessible and inclusive to all. Employers must design eLearning with diversity at the forefront to ensure all learners, despite their ability, age, ethnicity or experiences. Doing so will help contribute to a culture of respect, boost team productivity and empower diverse team members. 

There are several ways you can create eLearning courses with diversity and accessibility at the core. A good place to start is to ensure your learning content meets basic accessibility requirements, including videos with subtitles, alt texts for images, accompanying transcripts for video and audio clips, a high degree of contrast between colours and consistent use of language and terminology. From there, it’s important to consider three questions: 

• Can your learners perceive the content - visually or verbally? 
• Can learners understand the content?
• Can learners navigate and operate the content? 

Another important step is to incorporate cultural elements to ensure all employees feel welcome and represented, such as supporting multiple languages and ensuring any case studies, images, or videos are multiculturally diverse. Finally, it’s crucial that your recruiters can access your learning courses on computers, mobile and tablets to suit different ways of learning. 

eLearning is the golden key to staying ahead of the growing skills gaps. For busy recruitment teams, it’s imperative that learning is interactive, fun, accessible and even a little bit competitive. By implementing these strategies, you will see improved learner engagement and knowledge retention among your recruitment teams.