By Ken Lahti, Ph.D.
Hiring for call center jobs is challenging to say the least. Recruiters, hiring Managers, Human Resources Directors, Operations Managers, and anyone else who shares the responsibility for staffing contact centers all face the same hurdles when searching for a hire who:
• is ready to perform as an agent.
• can be quickly trained to do the job.
• will stay in the role long enough to be productive and provide a return on our recruitment and training investments.
• will perform best on key call center metrics like first-call resolution or revenue per hour.
Rather than leave hiring decisions to luck, employers have sought tools and processes that enable better decisions and that quantifiably improve business outcomes. But, effectively identifying high-potential candidates requires a more sophisticated approach than resume reviews and background checks, because experience doesn’t tell the whole story.
Employers need tools that reliably uncover information about candidate readiness and potential – and they need this information before the candidate either drops out of the process or accepts another offer. The tools for evaluating candidates must be easy to use and valued by end-users, and they should keep candidates engaged during the application process. And, of course, these tools and processes need to be fair to all candidates and defensible in the event of a legal challenge or administrative audit.
There has been tremendous progress over the past 100 years or so in behavioral sciences such as Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Psychometrics. These disciplines utilize data-driven scientific methods to solve real-world challenges, such as how to best evaluate candidates during the hiring process. The result of over a century of scientific developments is a comprehensive set of tools and proven approaches for making better hiring decisions.
Decades of research across thousands of organizations clearly shows that valid pre-employment assessment tools, including tests, simulations, and interviews, produce a clear return on investment (ROI) when used in hiring decisions. Organizations that go beyond experience and assess candidates’ skills and competencies in the hiring processes have:
• increased sales by 24%
• reduced turnover by 60%
• reduced average handling time by nearly a minute
These are just some examples of the kind of major impact realized by organizations that used assessments in their hiring processes. In this paper, you will learn how you too can identify the candidates most likely to sell more, drive higher customer satisfaction, and stay on the job longer.
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