News: How Technology Can Save Your Company Money

When it comes down to all the different aspects that make your company successful, hiring is the most important – HANDS DOWN! 

Spending large portions of expenses on this facet of Big Business can't be escaped. But, how much you avoid spending in turnover can determine if your business has a strong enough cornerstone to become successful and profitable.

Attrition and turnover are the leading causes to contact centers loosing money – or even going bankrupt.

There is no panacea or magic trick that will guarantee those who are hired will stick around and be excellent performers, but below are some tips and best practices that should help when hiring new employees. 

How do we get the right employees?

How do you go about getting the right employees in the first place? A pre-hire assessment test battery and job simulation testing will get you started in the right direction.

Pre-hire Assessment Battery: Perform a job analysis to determine what knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics need to be present for an employee to perform optimally on the job. Then identify the pre-hire assessments that can best identify these attributes. These may include problem-solving or cognitive ability assessments, personality assessments,and structured interviews. From there, the assessment battery must be validated through traditional criterion-related validation, validity transportability, or content validation.

Job Simulation Testing: Observing what candidates can do and how they react in real-life job situations is more accurate than asking candidates to describe their particular skills during an interview and finding out the hard way they can not perform routine tasks after hiring. To avoid this headache – measuring a candidate’s skills at performing necessary functions of the job beforehand, you will examine their aptitude for learning, critical thinking, verbal, numerical and logical reasoning. Personality tools can also help determine if the applicant’s personality, motivation, or typical behavior tendencies are suited for the job. Having the desired skills and abilities to perform, doesn’t always matter. Personal characteristics play an equally significant role.
 

Ok, we have them, how do we keep them?

Now that you have some tips on how to get the best talent through the door and sticking around through on-boarding – what are some ways to ensure they stick around?

Discretionary Work and Low Monitoring: A study showed that contact centers with high quality jobs that offer employees discretion in how to conduct the work and low employee monitoring typically experienced 9% turnover across all of the countries in the study vs. 36% turnover for those workers in jobs with low discretion and high monitoring. Often contact centers will make a job highly structured trying to get the most out of their workers and end up driving off their best and brightest talent instead of letting the top talent feed their performance enhancing ideas back to the other workers.

Teamwork: Another study found that employers who offer employees a chance to join a problem-solving group, where employees meet offline on a regular basis, had 50% fewer workers quit – provided at least 30% of the employees participated in the program. Using self-directed work groups who are given the resources to solve daily problems as they come up had similar successful results. In addition to a reduction in boredom, group work allows for the opportunity to learn new strategies for high performance and for solving common work problems. By participating in these groups, the employee likely has a higher sense of engagement and organizational commitment.

Incentives: The types of incentives can run the gamut, but specifically giving workers the opportunity for full-time work instead of part-time work, promotional job ladders, and pay-for performance are good incentives to implement. Additional training to enhance current skills or acquire new ones also serve as a reason for an employee to stay with the company and indicate company investment in the employee. If workers do not see the opportunity for full-time work or have an ability to advance, then they are more likely to walk away in search of a better opportunity.


– How does your company avoid attrition and turnover? 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