HOW LEARNNOVATORS HELPED TEAMLEASE
EQUIP ITS ASSOCIATES WITH INTERVIEWING SKILLS
USING A SIMULATION-BASED LEARNING APPROACH

THE CUSTOMER

TeamLease Services Private Limited is India’s largest and foremost people supply chain and HR Services Company. Established in 2002, TeamLease has its corporate office in Bangalore (India) and other full-fledged offices spread across the country. The company has a national footprint with over 75,000 employees across more than 800 locations, and engages with more than 1400 corporate clients cutting across a wide range of industries.

TeamLease offers a gamut of services that include Temporary Staffing, Permanent Recruitments, Payroll Process Outsourcing, Regulatory Compliance Services, Training and Assessments, and is also an integrated HR services provider.

THE REQUIREMENT

TeamLease’s employees (referred to as associates) were involved in identifying and recruiting talents for their corporate clients. Their day started and ended with interview sessions, their primary responsibility being to select candidates and match them with job descriptions.

Equipping associates to perform this role posed a few challenges. The company was heavily dependent on a mix of internal and external trainers for this purpose, and coordinating the logistical aspect of the Instructor-led Training (ILT) was painstaking and expensive. And, this (training) was a continuous affair since there was high employee turnover and the training was required for all new joinees.

TeamLease partnered with Learnnovators to find the most effective solution to address this business problem

THE SOLUTION

Learnnovators, after conducting a detailed analysis of TeamLease’s business needs, proposed an e-learning program on ‘Interviewing Skills’ program was to equip TeamLease associates handle interviews efficiently, by asking the right questions, and thereby choosing the best with a simulation-based approach. The objective of the proposed candidates.

The following were the instructional strategies that Learnnovators adopted in this program:

• Action First, Information Next: The (theoretical) information was delivered only as a by-product based on learners’ actions in the simulations. This technique helped make the learning program look ‘real’.
  
  
• Character-based Illustrations/Animations: The characters in the course helped learners relate to the scenarios with profound familiarity, since they largely mirrored their (learners’) own profile.
  
  
• Branching Simulated Interviewing Scenarios: These scenarios helped take learners through complex real-work situations that they would typically face in an interview. At each step of the interview, learners (who were assigned the role of the interviewer) had to choose the most appropriate question (to ask the interviewee) from a given set of questions.

And, at any point of time in the interview scenario, learners had all the required information (such as the client’s company information, the job profile, and the interviewee’s resume) required to conduct the interview. This strategy helped mimic the actual atmosphere in an interview. Learners were also provided with documents such as Candidate Rating Sheet and Sample Interview Questionnaire, which were available during the interview, and also as take-aways for later reference.

• Dynamically Changing Scenario Questions: To accommodate varied profiles (levels and verticals) of candidates in the interviewing scenarios (as in the real-work situation at TeamLease), Learnnovators implemented a system to allow learners to choose candidates with profiles of their preference while taking the course. This solution basically constituted a Dynamic Scenario Questions Engine (DSQE) consisting of a huge bank of meta-tagged questions that get triggered at run-time based on the options selected by the learner. This strategy helped TeamLease use the e-learning program for just-in-time or performance support scenarios as well.
  
  
• Performance Meters: 5.Performance Meters allowed learners to understand how they were faring in conducting the interview (scenario). The Question Meter indicated their performance in the current question, and the Interview Meter indicated their performance in the overall interview. Learners could click on these to view detailed feedback on their performance at any point of time during the scenario.

THE BENEFITS

The above approach allowed TeamLease associates to ‘practice’ conducting interviews in a safe environment, make mistakes and learn from them, and have the comfort of an expert providing constant guidance and feedback. This, in turn, equipped them to confidently handle the day-to-day challenges they faced in their workplace. It also helped TeamLease cut down on training costs considerably, thereby increasing their training ROI. The training feedback was so encouraging that TeamLease continued their engagement with Learnnovators long after the successful closure of this particular project.

THE HIGHLIGHTS

The following were the highlights of the Interviewing Skills program that Learnnovators developed for TeamLease:

• Action-First Approach that helped deliver theoretical information after the activity.

• Dynamically Changing Scenario Questions drawn from a huge question bank based on the profile of the candidate chosen by the learner.

TOOLS USED

Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Sonic Foundry Sound Forge