Complex Isn't the Same as Unteachable: Replacing "Watch and Learn" With Repeatable, Scalable Learning

The organization had been doing a lot of things right—
a genuinely impressive 90%+ career placement rate, built on years of institutional know-how. But leadership had also convinced themselves of something that wasn't quite true: that recruiting, their highest-priority and highest-stakes role, was too complex and too instinctive to actually teach. The only way to learn it, they believed, was the old-fashioned way—fully shadow someone for weeks, learn what you could by osmosis, until the person you shadowed decided you were ready to be pushed out of the nest.

That belief wasn't crazy. The way people recruited had, in fact, developed organically over years, shaped by hundreds of small decisions nobody had written down. But "it grew organically" and "it can't be taught" are two different claims—and mixing them up meant a new recruiter's success depended entirely on who they happened to shadow and how much time that person had to give them. It also meant wide inconsistencies in how the work actually got done in the field.

But here's what we believed going in: there was a repeatable process there—identifiable things that made a difference in whether a recruiter would be successful in their role. They just had never been organized or said out loud. The biggest part of this project wasn't building training content. It was finding the process that already existed in people's heads and making it visible and clear enough to explain to someone new.

We started by sitting down with leaders of the two schools, staff currently in the role, and regional managers—not to survey them, but to reconstruct what they were actually doing, decision by decision. We discovered that yes, there was a process there. We also discovered the role had things to teach that were far outside what anyone had considered—like how to handle distractions during a family visit, say, a dog that won't leave you alone.

That reconstruction shaped everything we designed:

• A training plan that accounted for geographic dispersion, saving in-person components for the topics where they mattered most

• A genuine blend—self-paced modules, live virtual sessions, in-person field training and shadowing, and one-on-one coaching—matched to what each skill actually required, not whatever was easiest to produce

• A four-week curriculum built from 41 individual pieces of learning, using a mix of methods suited to each

For the client, it became less about training and more of a realization: the way their best people worked wasn't instinct, it was a process—and once you could see it, you could document it, teach it, and repeat it. That realization outlasted the program itself. The client followed this engagement by applying the same approach to a different set of roles in another department.

© 2025 Sarah Kesher Consulting, L.L.C