Most contact centers rush through the recruiting and hiring process in order to fill agent openings quickly. In result, hiring managers end up with agents who never intended on working in customer care filling their desks. You can’t fault these individuals for their aimlessness in job selection – times are tough. You can, however, fault contact centers for theirs.
There are plenty of viable and passionate agent candidates out there – people looking to embrace a career in the contact center and to create positive and memorable customer experiences. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a team of inspired agents who truly want to be in your center rather than a bunch of placeholders just biding time until they find another job?
In order to build a team of high-quality agents, centers need to embrace the following recruiting and hiring practices:
1) Job Analysis:
A job analysis is a process of determining what competencies are important for success in specific roles, and it allows you to figure out the specific combination of skills, abilities, and personal characteristics needed for a candidate to fit and perform well in one job versus another.
A job analysis that identifies the relative importance of specific skills, abilities, personal characteristics, and interpersonal traits allows your hiring team to understand the unique competency profile that is likely to make a candidate a strong fit for a particular job.
The most progressive contact centers use social media not just to respond to customer complaints and queries but also to recruit the center’s future stars. Concise and captivating tweets like “Hot job for customer-focused folks” that include the right hashtags along with a link to a compelling job description can go a long way toward attracting highly qualified applicants.
The best way to test each qualified applicant to ensure they truly have the goods to effectively handle your customer contacts and abuse is via a good pre-hire agent assessment solution. A well developed, validated, and standardized pre-hire assessment tool measures the extent to which candidates demonstrate each of the critical competencies. Employee behavior and performance, even in a limited context such as within a specific job, reflect many individual characteristics working in concert. Given the complex interactions among these personal qualities, it is generally good practice to try to measure as many of them as is practically feasible. If the measurement of individual differences is overly limited, your organization will overlook important characteristics needed to predict employee success, and will reap lower returns from any investment in the pre-hire assessment process. Pre-hire assessments of all types exist to help hiring teams identify those candidates who possess the proper mix of competencies required for on-the-job success.
An online recruiting process is
more cost-effective, easier to manage, and leads to better quality candidates
than using employee referrals, job fairs and paper advertisements. In addition
to reducing paper, it also allows you to keep track of what employees have
applied, their scores on each type of assessment, and where they are in the
hiring process. Using an online recruiting process also increases the
likelihood of finding applicants who are familiar with basic computer programs
because they must know enough to conduct a job search online and write and
submit a resume. This way, you can automatically screen out applicants who do
not meet a minimum level of skill with a computer.
Follow Up: Track the effectiveness of each recruiting method – and take appropriate action based on the results.
Contact centers that consistently acquire and retain talented and dedicated agents have a holistic recruitment tracking process in place, one that not only tracks how many qualified applicants each recruiting method brings in, but also how those applicants who accept a job perform during training and beyond – and how long they stick around. By continuously keeping tabs on which recruitment methods give the most bang for the buck and which ones need to be improved or perhaps eliminated, these organizations continually maintain a focused and cost-effective hiring program that sets them – and their agents – up for success long into the future.
– How does your company recruit the best possible candidate? Please submit your response below.
All information compiled in this blog post was gathered from "How to Measure Contact Center Skills Using Multimedia Simulations." – compiled by FurstPerson.
To read the full text and discover more solutions that help candidates find a job they will love and enable clients to hire people that will perform well, be satisfied, and stay with the company – visit www.furstperson.com.
Hire Furst, Hire Right – FurstPerson
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