News: Why Progressive Companies Recruit Online

Use an online recruiting process when hiring – PERIOD! 

Companies that continue to use the "traditional" approaches to finding and assessing candidates are being left behind by competition that have moved on to a more progressive approach. The Pros at FurstPerson have developed an online recruiting process to help companies who've been using the same hiring techniques for years. 

Here are 3 reasons to ditch the old methods for an online search:

1) More cost-effective 
2) Easier to manage
3) Leads to better quality candidates

By allowing technology to do the 'heavy-lifting' with an online based hiring process, managers have more time to accurately, and reliably predict a candidate's likelihood of on-the-job-success. With the company's time and resources focused on ONLY candidates who have been “pre-qualified,” via an internet-based search – hiring costs are cut, and achieving ROI on your company’s most important investment, your employees – is achieved.

Instant Results:

• Reduces paper trail.
• One easy place to store applicant information.
• Tracks assessments and scores.
• Hiring Managers easily organize their hiring process.
• Automatically screen out applicants who do not meet a minimum level of computer skill.

How We Keep Things Fresh at FurstPerson:

Now that the Nintendo generation is all grown-up – FurstPerson saw potential value in combining elements from the video game industry with the CC Audition design to create an engaging, fun candidate experience that portrays the contact center job realistically while measuring essential skills accurately from the best candidates possible.

Old Recruiting Techniques to Avoid:

• Job Fairs
• Employee Referrals
• Paper Advertisements
• Contacting Previous Employees

This survey shows results from more than 5,200 contact center job candidates who used CC Audition job simulation during the hiring process.

Table Notes: This feed-back reinforces the potential for multimedia contact center simulations to enhance the candidate experience while providing a lifelike window into the job, thus potentially encouraging ill-suited candidates to opt out of the process. 

So, it's beneficial for candidates, but what about Hiring Manager's..?

• The notion of creating a “fun” candidate experience received enthusiastic endorsement from contact center recruiting teams, which frequently struggled to move large volumes of candidates through the entirety of the hiring process. Ultimately, the need for a high-fidelity contact center skills assessment that provided candidates with an informative and entertaining experience laid the groundwork for CC Audition.

• In addition to designing a reliable, valid assessment, the team also attempted to develop a simulation that would deliver an engaging candidate experience. Job seekers spend hours conducting job searches and completing pre-hire applications and assessments. An organization that is able to create a fun and interesting pre-hire process may be better positioned to hire its most coveted recruits.

What FurstPerson Does:

A comprehensive applicant screening and placement solution is a strategic imperative for leading companies. In today’s competitive environment, FurstPerson is helping progressive companies replace traditional applicant screening practices with continuous data-fed processes built around sophisticated assessments that accurately predict a candidate’s likelihood of success in terms of producing better customer satisfaction, increased sales, and higher customer retention.

–  How does your company search for fresh talent? Please submit your answers in the comment section 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

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