Using Behaviorism to Develop Ambassadors

Before I got into ID, I was a college recruiter for our company. I attended career fairs and all sort of other recruitment events in an effort to teach students about our company and of course, to recruit them for internships and full-time jobs. When attending recruitment events, I always took at least one employee, who was usually an engineer and often a former intern. Students generally want to talk with “actual” engineers and not just HR representatives, and they also like to talk with more recent graduates, who they can more easily identify with. Having these employees along was always hugely beneficial to me, especially when students wanted to have more technical conversations that I was just not qualified to have.

When selecting people to take on the road, I mostly chose people who I knew had good communication skills. On the very few occasions where I did not do this, but just took someone who happened to be an alum of the particular school, I learned quickly that communication skills and the ability to talk with (and not at) students is very important. What ended up happening, is that I would tap the same people over and over to go on these trips. I was starting to worry that managers were getting a little antsy about me taking their staff out of the office, and taking only certain staff and not others, so I began to devise a plan to solve this issue.

That plan has now morphed into a training program to develop ambassadors for the company. There will be several modules in the training to support the required knowledge/skills for each type of recruitment event that we attend. To start out with, we will be giving everyone foundational skills needed for any form of recruitment or networking when representing the company. One aspect of the training will be around Stump Speeches – what they are and how to write and deliver one. This aspect of the training will be all behavior based.

We will describe what stump speeches are, why they’re important and how they work. We will demonstrate how to deliver the company stump speech – the basics about who we are and what we do. Then we will give the learners opportunities to practice giving the company stump speech and we’ll use feedback and positive reinforcement to encourage them.

While we are still early on in the development stage of the modules, I imagine we will be using similar models to teach other communication and presentation skills to this group. Once they complete a module, learners will be rewarded by moving on to the next module and therefore moving up tiers of competency. So, after gaining skills in the foundational areas, they will be able to attend the easier events. Then they will move on to more advanced modules and be able to attend more complex events – events that require more skill to maneuver. (that sounds a bit like cognitivism, ay?)

They benefit from gaining these important leadership skills, which will help them grow at our company. We benefit from having a deep bench of ambassadors to call on for the various types of recruitment events that require more than just HR reps. Win win!