Virtual reality has the potential to aid employers with a vast range of aspects relating to the hiring and onboarding of new talent to their startups. In a business where there is little margin for error when making new hires, VR can emerge as an excellent tool for getting new recruits up to speed and ready to hit the ground running. 

There’s plenty of reason for your startup or SBE to adopt virtual reality training, and as PwC data shows, evidence indicates that it’s a largely beneficial technology to adopt for users throughout a range of sectors. 

For instance, PwC’s study into VR training has shown that 40% of VR learners saw an improvement in confidence compared to their classroom-based counterparts, with a further 35% improvement when it comes to action upon what has been learned following the undertaking of training programs. 

Furthermore, it was found that virtual learners completed their training programs four-times faster than classroom training. Data has also shown that these learners felt as much as 3.75-times more emotionally connected to the content they were learning than classroom learners. 

(Image: Gamesindustry.biz)

As the data above shows, enterprise VR revenue is expected to grow exponentially over the course of the decade, leading to more advanced solutions for startups and small businesses to utilize.

But in what ways can virtual reality help to enhance the recruitment process of enterprises? Let’s take a deeper look into the values that lie in embracing virtual reality solutions: 

More Efficiency at a Lower Cost

There are many examples of how virtual reality technology has the power to deliver more learning efficiency at a lower cost to businesses–and at a far quicker pace than more traditional approaches to training and onboarding. This is because VR empowers users to experience more training repetitions in industries that can carry small margins for error. 

For instance, VR can help aviation maintenance personnel to practice key processes to help to limit the chances of accidents occurring without the need for aircraft to be taken out of service in order to deliver training. This means that more planes can be kept in the air without a greater risk of accidents arising as a result. 

While it’s certainly important for startups and small businesses to ensure that employees are trained effectively without losing money or missing out on earning potential, the best thing about virtual reality is its efficiency. 

With less time taken to learn new skills, the chances for errors to take place are significantly mitigated while new information is better retained.

Furthermore, this information retention can mean that VR training is a great tool for a multitude of different sectors–not just high-risk roles. 

Because employee preparedness is vital in just about every industry, we’re seeing more retailers adopt VR onboarding simulations to help ready staff for managing new departments, or to prepare for recurring events like Black Friday. These virtual simulations can also help customer-facing employees to manage difficult situations that may arise with customers in a more engaging way that can prepare them for the real thing. 

Fostering Greater Employee Engagement

One of the best facets of virtual reality training is the degree of employee engagement that it affords small businesses. In a recent article for Forbes, Metaverse expert Cathy Hackl noted that DHL workers used Immerse Platform to compete to stack cargo packages in a more skilled and knowledgeable manner. 

Immerse, a virtual reality platform, utilized DHL’s standard operating procedures to create VR training programs that enabled employees to train in virtual spaces no matter where they were based in the world. The addition of a global leaderboard built into the training program also offered a greater level of engagement and healthy competition among employees. 

Because VR training can be gamified in this way, it’s possible for businesses to upskill its existing workforce while improving the employee experience. 

This paves the way for more sustainable growth opportunities for startups whereby small teams can continue to hone their skills and develop competencies without the need for immediate expansion or time-consuming onboarding processes.

Improving Invaluable Employee Soft Skills

Virtual reality training can help startups and small businesses to grow the skillsets of existing employees in a far more impactful way. Through programs designed to improve soft skills like interpersonal relationships, understanding matters of diversity and inclusivity, sharing feedback, and sensitive HR matters, teams can collaborate in a more meaningful way that can improve employee retention rates and performance. 

While there are many existing examples of VR programs that take a special focus on soft skills, we can take a quick look at Glue, which is a program that creates virtual meeting spaces with collaborative tools. 

“When you’re training with coworkers, there are still professional respect and filters there, which you won’t have with a simulated human,” explains Scott Likens, a tech specialist at PwC. “It’s a safer space.”.

Given that the headsets to support virtual reality training are continuing to become more cost effective at enterprise level, it’s likely to only be a matter of time before the practice becomes commonplace among smaller businesses–providing startups with the opportunity to build teams that can collaborate in a more engaging, conducive, and effective way. 

Building the Workplace of the Future

We’re already seeing a multitude of large organizations like Meta and the Bank of America adopting virtual reality training to better optimize their onboarding processes. 

The growing accessibility of the technology and its cost-effectiveness over time are likely to make VR training a viable prospect for smaller organizations in the coming years–particularly in more high-risk professions at first such as healthcare, transportation, and energy-based industries. 

However, with their ability to reduce onboarding times and employee training costs over a long-term basis, it’s likely that recruiters, trainers, and learning providers around the world will be keen to utilize the potential of virtual reality, and for startups with ambitions towards securing sustainable growth, it could be worth thinking seriously about embracing the potential of VR sooner rather than later. 

Yet, VR training options could soon be reducing onboarding time and employee training costs in all types of industries. Recruiters, trainers, and learning providers of all kinds should probably be keeping an eye on it.