Why upskilling your people is a smart thing to do 

No one will argue that your employees are the most important asset of any company. In fact, it might be one of the most cliche things to say these days... Despite all the fluff around the subject, I do not see a lot of companies putting their money where their mouth is. In this short article, I will outline how we try to do it the other way around. Building a company from scratch with a heavy emphasis on making people better versions of themselves - professionally and yes personally. You do bring both of them to work every day - we think that actually makes a lot of sense.

Being in the recruitment industry this becomes even more visible because we do not deal with products or software but with people and only people... 

Why is training your people a smart thing to do?

Well for us the most important answer is: happy employees mean happy clients. And happy people tend to stay put meaning; creating a lower turnover of staff. It is a hugely overlooked topic in my opinion. Besides making sure that people stay put - which doesn’t add anything to the bottom line - you want your people to keep developing and improving their existing skillset. This does add direct value to your team, clients, and thus your company.

Perhaps even more important - you want to install a culture of continuous learning within your organization. People helping each other out with fresh ideas and new insights. In order to achieve this we have set-up an internal training method (periodically) which is based on 3 main pillars:

1. Weekly: E-learning Modules (we use SocialTalent for that) 

2. Monthly: Classroom Masterclasses (with our KeenAcademy)

3. Quarterly: Personal Coaching (Personal Development Training)

Not really a pillar but still a lot of fun which is fundamental to our company culture:

1. Yearly: Citytrip to meet industry peers & get inspired (Last year we went to Berlin and did on-site visits with TalentWunder, N26, and Zalando. Our trip to Dublin had to be canceled due to COVID19).

2. Randomly: a member of our team teaches the others about a new tool they use and the best tricks they use like Slack, Trello, Calendly, etc.

The purpose of this set-up is simple but effective to make sure that everybody who joins us gets the possibility to make their own learning curve as steep as they can handle (or are motivated to). Basically, we offer the input so they can decide how to maximize their output! 

Why giving the opportunity to your people to learn is so important?

After 30+ Masterclasses, 400 hours of classroom training, and 1000+ hours of online training and 1 city trip to Berlin we learned something as well. People want to be seen, appreciated, and taken care of.

And most of all they love being part of something bigger than just a company that happens to pay their paycheck. They want to grow and have a sense of direction. For us, this means the training of our people defines who we are - for us the growth of our people is what defines us!

To launching our Keen Academy online 

We have doubled down on training our recruiters since day 1. As a consequence, we have been able to scale our own organization rapidly but more importantly the Talent Acquisition teams of our partners e.g. Takeaway and Rabobank. Allowing them to focus on their growth and strategic goals. In the meantime, we have had a 0% turnover in our internal staff. And our keenies have been able to grow their professional careers moving from juniors to seniors or some even made it to team-lead. And very important - having fun along the way!

So with this in the back of our minds, we decided that on our roadmap for 2020, we had to make our KeenAcademy available to the world. COVID19 only accelerated this process to a completely new online concept! Since last month, we have now opened globally our KeenAcademy to all recruiters and talent teams around the globe. Discover our Academy here!

You can now offer your employees to upskill themselves too from their homes. There is no doubt that upskilling your people will bring you happy and engaged employees and in time will prove to be a solid ROI.