ContactBabel, a leading analyst firm covering the call center industry that is based in the UK, recently released their 2011 US Contact Center Decision Makers’ Guide (2011 Guide). FurstPerson provided sponsorship of the report.
The report covers topics focused on people, process, and technology. The report is based on extensive interviews with 209 contact centers across a broad number of industry groups and agent size. The report provides information on how your peers view the industry, including its recruitment and hiring practices.
This thorough report from ContactBabel offers information on how respondents replied to questions on different subjects. In this brief, we aim to share some alternative views based on our hands-on experience and research with contact center organizations. In this post, we will share our insights on the best tools for hiring contact center agents.
What Hiring Tools Are Need to Find the Right People for Open Call Center Positions?
When an organization creates the hiring process for a specific job, it is essential to connect the hiring tools to the job’s competency model. For instance, the 2011 Guide reveals that 88% of respondents stated that agents need to use more than one application when dealing with customer interactions. It’s no surprise that multi-tasking was identified as a key competency for effective job performance. This raises the question, What is the best way to assess multi-tasking – through an interview, a personality test, or a call center simulation? If hiring managers in call centers do not identify the best assessments and tools to evaluate the essential competencies that impact job performance, they greatly limit their ability to accurately assess candidates’ skills, abilities, and work behaviors, making it harder to find the most qualified agents.
The 2011 Guide outlines contact center respondents’ opinions on the effectiveness of various assessments/hiring tools. The face-to-face interview was consistently rated as the most effective hiring tool according to these respondents.
How effective are the top recruiting methods?
Simulations, personality assessments, and cognitive ability tests all outperform the interview when it comes to accurately measuring candidates’ qualifications and predicting which candidates will demonstrate better on-the-job performance
We have discussed the role of the interview in previous articles. While the interview is an important tool to develop rapport with the candidate, evaluate oral communication, and provide additional predictive power in certain well-structured formats, FurstPerson research and other well-documented empirical literature has shown that the interview is much less effective than many other types of assessment tools. For example, simulations, personality assessments, and cognitive ability tests all outperform the interview when it comes to accurately measuring candidates’ qualifications and predicting which candidates will demonstrate better on-the-job performance. The ideal approach is a combination of these assessments plus an interview. This enables the hiring manager to measure work habits (interview), work attitudes (personality), work ability (cognitive), and work skills (simulation).
How Different Types of Assessments Rank in Predicting On-the-job Performance of Candidates
The chart below illustrates the relative “predictive power” of different types of assessments. The 2011 Guide does highlight a critical trend related to “proof of concept” in the use of any tools for contact center hiring:
Businesses can improve their ongoing recruitment techniques
“By tracking the in-job performance of applicants who scored either well or poorly in pre-job assessments, businesses can improve their ongoing recruitment techniques. For example, agents who have high assessment test scores often have higher revenue-per-call ratios, lower average call lengths and lower attrition rates than those who scored lower in pre-job character and personality assessments. The behaviors, personality traits and characteristics that a top agent is most likely to have can then be identified, and the results fed back into the top of the recruitment process. This allows the recruitment process to seek out the types of people who have already been proven to succeed in that role.” (page 211 from the report.)
Taking the time to conduct an empirically based analysis of the job, identify the competencies required for success in that job, and then match the right hiring tools to evaluate job candidates on those competencies enables the organization to select talent based on real performance drivers. The net result is better new hire retention and job performance that can be quantified into a business case.
Those respondents who supported a performance driven hiring process backed by empirical research and carefully chosen selection tools have highlighted the right approach to call center hiring.
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