by Steven Lindner | Aug 25, 2015 | Candidate Assessment and Selection, Hiring and Retention, Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics |
What’s The Business Value of Call Center Agents?
Call centers have well defined performance metrics. Want to grab the attention of the C-Suite? Then ensure your recruiting and selection efforts enable the call center agents to meet or exceed the centers performance metrics and deliver real value to the business bottom line.
When it comes to servicing customers — whether it be for technical support, product information, billing and payment processing, or online shopping assistance — quality counts. Call center agents, whether in an inbound, outbound or blended contact center, perform a vital function that drives sales, maintains customers and most importantly, builds brand loyalty.
Sixty (60%) percent of buyers prefer to pay more for better customer service. Eighty-six (86%) percent will stop doing business with a brand because of bad customer service experiences. Eighty-nine (89%) percent of buyers will migrate to a competitor after a poor customer interaction with the original brand1. If these three reasons are not compelling enough to receive the recruiting budget and timeline you need to positively influence your company’s bottom line, then consider the following fact. Buyers are more likely to share their negative experiences than their positive ones. With the rise of social media, negative reviews can rapidly reach thousands of people and impact a company’s reputation in just a few short business hours. Now more than ever, customers are the ones who promote a company’s brand. The ability of call center agents to deliver superior customer service, be it order, billing, account maintenance or help desk support, can give a company an edge over its competitors.
We are all in agreement that empty call center seats have real cost to the business, but so do seats occupied with the wrong talent. More and more, call centers are investing heavily in call center agent talent acquisition and recruiting in an effort to add good talent to their teams. As discussed in Recruiting Budgets, is it money well spent? investing in recruiting and selection can pay dividends.
Identifying Quality Call Center Agent Talent Is Simple Right?
In order to deliver quality customer service and maintain strong relationships with clients, companies need to identify and employ competent and skilled call center agents capable of turning each customer into a loyal brand ambassador. Based on our experience in high volume call center recruiting, the biggest challenge for recruiting and HR professionals is determining how to select the best talent for such positions when the competencies needed to perform these duties change and evolve constantly. Many contact centers use multiple channels to provide quality service to customers via phone, email, online chat, and in some cases video chat. Each channel requires a unique constellation of competencies to perform well, and a call center agent who might perform well using one channel may not be able to perform equally as well at another. This makes it important for recruiters to identify what competencies are most important for specific roles before starting the search for qualified candidates.
Recruiters should begin by deciding which relevant competencies can easily and reliably be assessed and how to sequence them in terms of priority for the selection process. For example, listening skills would be more important for representatives responding to customers via phone or video chat compared to those addressing customer concerns through email and text chat, where reading comprehension plays a greater role. Similarly, written communication skills and attention to detail would be more critical for call center agents communicating via text chat and emails than over the phone.
Against our advice, a client of ours once promoted their best customer service agents from phone-based support to email and text chat support only to find many of them unable to satisfy customers. One funny example that comes to mind, which was not so funny at the time, was when a well-intended call center agent responded with I am sorry our product damaged your sh*t when he meant shirt. Clearly, not all competencies are created equal across the different call center agent roles. Identifying and assessing critical competencies for successful performance is key for selecting the right quality candidates.
Obviously, not all call center agent positions are the same. The competencies important in customer service positions also vary based on the type of call center and the services they provide. For example, inbound center agents may need high level skills with conflict resolution, problem solving, technical trouble-shooting, or empathy. An outbound center agent may require greater skills in presentation, negotiation, and relationship building. Likewise, agents who communicate with customers through multiple channels may require higher level skills across a broader spectrum of competencies than a representative that focuses on a single channel.
As call centers adapt and change into contact centers with multiple customer service channels, companies will need to refine their competency models and change the candidate profiles of who they recruit and hire. Reviewing and identifying critical competencies for specific positions can significantly impact the quality of candidates selected and, as a result, contact center performance. Since quality customer service plays a critical role in a company’s ability to maintain business relationships with customers and protect its brand, ensuring that call center agents have the necessary skill sets at the appropriate level is a critical factor in ensuring business success.
How Call Center / Contact Center Agent Recruiting Professionals Can Impact the Business
- Critically evaluate the competency model with the hiring team to ensure it is appropriate for the specific role you are recruiting
- Build your candidate sourcing strategy from the competencies established for each unique role
- Screen candidates for the specific competencies associated with each call center agent role
- Revise your sourcing strategy and candidate screening process as positions evolve
- Look beyond call center / contact center experience and focus more on the underlying competencies required for successful performance to build wider candidate pools
- Partner with the hiring team to ensure recruitment and selection strategies are yielding hires that positively influence the key performance indicators that impact customer satisfaction and help the business meet its objectives
For more information about how to identify and connect critical call center agent competencies to call center recruiting strategies, please contact us here at The WorkPlace Group.
References
1. Top Contact Center Trends for 2015 – Compare Business Products http://www.comparebusinessproducts.com/resources/item/the-contact-center-in-2015
by Steven Lindner | Jul 29, 2015 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics, Talent Acquisition |
The June 2015 job report – showing 223,000 new jobs created in June and a 5.3% national unemployment rate at a 7-year low – was great news for those who have been job hunting 1. But for companies that need to hire new employees, these numbers are creating new challenges to find the perfect candidate.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the declining unemployment rate is not just a result of job creation, but also owed in part to a decline in the number of people looking for work. Indeed, the labor-force participation rate 2, or the share of the population working or looking for a job, marked a 38-year low at 62.6%. According to Steve Goldstein of MarketWatch, this is a combination of baby boomers hitting retirement (the bigger factor) and other people who have given up trying to get a job. The percentage of those who aren’t in the labor force and who want a job, at 7.1% in June 2015, is only slightly higher than the 6.8% rate in June 2007, before the onset of the Great Recession. 3
Juggling Time to Hire with Quality of Hire
Finding that perfect candidate is becoming increasingly more difficult and employers are feeling heightened pressure to fill job openings. As the job market tightens, time-to-hire increases. In a study conducted by Glassdoor.com, in comparison to 2010, the average time-to-hire has increased by 10.3 days.4 With time-to-hire being an important recruiting metric, the pressure to hire less-than-ideal candidates is compounded when fewer job candidates exist. In an effort to avoid having positions vacant for too long, employers are frequently tempted to hire less-than-ideal candidates despite the long term implications.
Making poor hiring decisions by hiring less-than-ideal candidates can wind up costing companies much more in the end than holding out for the right hires. In Recruiting Budgets: Is it Money Well Spent? Googles Vice President of People Operations, Lazlo Bock shares that [Google] spends twice as much of its people budget hiring [recruiting budget] than the average company guided by the philosophy that the better job Google does to begin with, the fewer resources will have to be spent rehabilitating underachievers or replacing people who dont work out.
So what does all this mean for employers trying to recruit candidates?
As the market becomes more challenging, more creative candidate sourcing strategies are needed. Recruiters need to reach deeper into the labor pool, cast wider nets, and ensure they reach across recruitment channels to connect with candidates for both current and future talent needs. Employers also need to re-think the essential elements of their ideal candidate profiles.
Casting your line deeper and farther: Recruiting Outside the Box
As recruiters reach deeper and farther into the talent pool, building candidate communities that connect with your employment brand is one way to get ahead of the curve and avoid being myopically focused on just todays openings. Recruiters also need to connect the dots to new career paths for candidates as well as consider qualifications based on aptitudes and indicators of job success other than prior experience. For example, target candidates who have transferable skills. Candidates are frequently attracted to opportunities that help them transition into new career paths or industries. For positions offering training programs (like tech support and customer service) companies may also consider hiring individuals based on trainability rather than prior experience.
An initial step in this kind of candidate sourcing and selection is identifying what skills-can be pragmatically trained versus those skills and core knowledge that candidates need to have in order to benefit from your training. For example, its relatively easy to train employees on how to use a specific computer program or the ins and outs of your industry or companys offerings. In contrast, advanced programming skills or core engineering knowledge are much more challenging to tackle. Putting longer training programs in place can help compensate for a lack of industry or job knowledge, provided of course, all other qualities and competencies already exist.
Perhaps the most frequently passed over pool of untapped candidates exists among the underemployed. There are millions of working professionals employed in jobs that are below their skill levels. Included in this underemployed job segment are part-time workers who are actually in need of full-time jobs. Although the number of new jobs in the last few years has increased, the majority of those jobs are at the entry and low-experience level. Therefore, many of those laid off at the start or during the recession have, by necessity, been re-employed in positions that underutilize their skills and experience. For example, someone who held a Director-level position pre-recession may now be working as a manager. Identifying Underemployed Workers provides specific tips on how to find great talent among the underemployed.
Rabbit and the Turtle: Both have value in recruiting
In a tightening labor market, balancing hiring well with hiring fast is ever more difficult to achieve. The tendency is to tilt us towards selecting those we may not have hired a year or two ago. However that may not be a bad thing if it leads you to dig deeper, expanding your sourcing efforts, developing candidate communities and offering candidates opportunities they would not otherwise be able to have with you. In fact, when done well, it leads you to perfect candidates you would have ordinarily missed.
For more information about how to develop and utilize creative sourcing and selection strategies in your recruiting efforts, please contact us here at The WorkPlace Group.
References
1 Morath, Eric (July 2, 2015). Jobs at a Crossroads: Hiring Up, Pay Flat. The Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/jobs-report-u-s-payrolls-climb-by-223-000-1435840430)
2 Timiraos, Nick (July 2, 2015). The June Jobs Report in 10 Charts. The Wall Street Journal. http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/07/02/the-june-jobs-report-in-10-charts/)
3 Goldstein, Steve. (July 2, 2015). Labor-force participation drops to lowest level since 1977. MarketWatch. https://news.fidelity.com/news/news.jhtml?cat=Economy.US&articleid=201507021020MRKTWTCHNEWS_SVC000271&IMG=N)
4 Dill, Kathryn (June 22, 2015). Study Confirms The American Hiring Process Is Now 10.3 Days Longer. Forbes. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryndill/2015/06/22/study-confirms-the-american-hiring-process-is-now-10-3-days-longer/
5Image by http://quickbooks.intuit.com/r/hiring-and-recruiting/checklist-evaluating-job-candidates
by Steven Lindner | Jun 29, 2015 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics |
showcased an interview with Googles Vice President of People Operations, Lazlo Bock. In his book Work Rules! Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead,” Bock shares insider details and anecdotes from how Google has managed to become the number one Best Company to Work For, according to a Forbes Magazine study over the past six years.
In this interview, Bock states that [Google] spends twice as much of its people budget hiring [recruiting budget] than the average company guided by the philosophy that the better job Google does to begin with, the fewer resources will have to be spent rehabilitating underachievers or replacing people who dont work out. The WorkPlace Group shares Bocks view and has seen this to be true in many of our client companies as well. An up-front investment in good recruiting and selection avoids wasting dollars and time on corrective training, performance improvement and terminations, not to mention mishaps in serving customers and the cost to re-hire and replace employees who did not work out. To do this, requires a recruiting budget that can support this objective. Simply put, smarter recruiting and selection helps prevent the wrong candidate from being hired.
Spend Now, Save Later
Minimizing recruiting and selection costs [your recruiting budgets], intuitively, makes business sense. Great businesses keep their operating costs low to maximize their profit margins. Since Recruitment and Talent Acquisition functions are typically considered a cost center rather than a revenue driver to the business, recruiting managers are often challenged and incentivized to reduce costs [minimize their recruiting budgets] and do more with less.
In recruiting, the cost-per-hire metric has become the industry standard for evaluating recruitment costs and forecasting their recruiting budgets. The cost-per-hire metric tells us the average cost to hire an employee. Its derived by dividing the total amount spent on recruiting activities (e.g., your annual recruiting budget + recruiting costs paid out from budgets held by other departments) by the number of hires made. (The Society for Human Resource Management has published an American National Standard on how to calculate the cost-per-hire metric. Click here to download your copy)
While keeping recruiting budgets lean makes business sense, we cannot lose sight of the fact that great businesses need Great People. In fact, investors including the sharks on Shark Tank state that they invest more in the people running the business than the business itself. As Kevin OLeary states people are everything.
If people are everything, then why do we commoditize a companys efforts to identify, attract and select great talent? Shouldnt we focus more on the business value of those we hire rather than what it costs to hire them? If Mr. Bock worked as a recruitment director for most other companies, he might have received a negative appraisal on his costs per hire and recruiting budget. In fact, he would have probably been required to significantly cut his recruiting budget.
Success: Firsthand
True to Lazlo Bocks work at Google, we have been an instrumental part of several success stories where our clients increased their recruiting budget in order to achieve meaningful business results and positive ROIs. One such example was documented by our client in an HRO Today article, Thirsting for a Recruitment Solution.
The Honickman Group, as a result of their recruitment partnership with The WorkPlace Group saw openings get filled quicker, vacancies that used to haunt the company during peak seasons no longer left empty, and the overall quality of the candidates markedly improved. The Senior Vice-President of Human Resources stated, Clearly, our costs are higher, but the savings from filled positions more than paid for themselves. By implementing a structured outsourced process, the company was able to hire superior employees due to more accurate job descriptions and better assessment tools, and their time to fill these positions was cut in half. The higher quality of these new hires, in turn, helped the company better retain its customers. The additional dollars spent in their recruiting budget was going to be covered by reduced turnover, higher quality candidates, and retained accounts that would have been lost by not serving them properly, said the Senior Vice-President of HR.
Investing in Recruiting Pays Dividends
Bocks principle for recruiting boils down to one thing: your more valuable recruitment metric is quality of hire-not cost-per-hire. Though it may require higher recruiting budgets to recruit quality candidates, the up-front costs are well worth it. Hiring the right talent not only saves time and dollars in fixing bad hiring decisions, more importantly, it drives business growth and revenue.
For more information on how smart recruiting can drive business value, please contact The WorkPlace Group.
by Steven Lindner | Jun 2, 2015 | Hiring and Retention, Talent Acquisition |
Social media is a term that is heard a great deal these days. As frequently as it’s heard, one could start to think that it is the cure-all solution for just about every business need, including recruitment. Using social media for recruiting, sometimes called social recruiting, often utilizes multiple media channels. As a result, the notion of a single source of hire is becoming considerably less relevant, if not completely obsolete.
As The WorkPlace Group has discussed in its blog post Source of Hire: Capturing both the chicken and the egg, utilizing multiple sites and sources provides many different ways for candidates to learn about your company and its open positions. By the time candidates click on the “Apply Now!” button, they have likely seen information about your company and openings in job postings, tweets, industry blogs, emails, referrals from others and/or even online reviews of your company.
Why Use Social Recruiting?
Creating positive employment branding messages and a positive recruitment experience can both influence candidates to apply for positions as well as refer others in their network to do the same. The question then becomes, how do you utilize a mix of social recruiting tactics effectively to promote your employer brand, help attract qualified candidates for your current openings and build a talent community for future openings?
Social media can provide persuasive communication channels on a global basis to capture the attention of both potential job seekers and gainfully employed candidates. Social recruiting is a great way to create and establish your corporate and employment brands, communicate your current job openings and future needs for talent as well as establish more personal on-going relationships with your candidates.
Which Social Media Sites Should We Choose for Social Recruiting?
With so many social media channels available to us, which ones should we choose for recruiting? In evaluating sites for social recruiting, it’s important to understand the differences and strengths of each media outlet. User demographics, usage, relevance and accuracy of information are important criteria to determine whether the social media channel has a user base that is representative of your target talent needs. Below is an overview of the most popular sites used in social recruiting: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Seventy-three percent (73%) of recruiters report that they have hired a candidate through social media, with LinkedIn being by far the most popular source at 79%. Facebook was a distant second, with just 26% of recruiters reporting a hire from that source.1 However, Facebook has a much larger user base, with over 1 billion users, compared to LinkedIn’s 187 million.
There are also differences in each site’s demographics regarding age and gender. LinkedIn and Facebook are more popular with users over the age of 45,while Twitter is more popular with millennials between 18 and 29. LinkedIn’s user base is 67% male, so it might not be the most effective way to reach female candidates. Although not typically used for social recruitment, Pinterest leads the pack with an 80% female user base.
It’s also very important to take into consideration the best uses of different social media sites. A social media site’s effectiveness as a social recruiting source can be affected by more than just your company’s efforts. LinkedIn, which is widely viewed as the traditional site for business-related social media, is better for searching and contacting candidates, but Facebook and Twitter are better for generating employee referrals. Only 14% of LinkedIn users check their accounts regularly, so messages can frequently go unnoticed and information can quickly become outdated. While you’ll probably reach more job seekers on Facebook, actual job posts will get more views when they are posted on LinkedIn. As for Twitter, although you may reach more millennials there, it’s virtually impossible to post a full job description in just 140 characters.
In addition to using social media as a way to convey job openings and searching for candidates, recruiters also use social media sites to “research” candidates. A whopping 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn when sourcing candidates because it typically gives a broad outline of the person’s professional background. Looking at a person’s Facebook or Twitter accounts can give recruiters information on candidates that might not be apparent from their resume alone. Ninety-three percent admit to “snooping” on applicants’ social media profiles before deciding whether to proceed with them or recommend them for a position.
The Right “Social Media” Tool for the Job
Not all social media sites are created equal. When putting a social recruiting strategy in place, select social media channels that are aligned with and facilitate achievement of your recruitment objectives. A social media site’s user demographics, usage, and currency of information are all important criteria that impact which sites you should use and how (e.g., employment branding vs. promoting a job posting vs. direct candidate sourcing).
As with many other areas of recruitment, the ball is definitely in the court of the employer and recruiter when it comes to creating engaging employment brand messaging and a positive recruitment experience for candidates. The WorkPlace Group has extensive experience using social media to help our clients maximize the impact of their recruitment efforts. For more information about how to incorporate social recruiting in your talent acquisition efforts, please contact an associate at The WorkPlace Group® today.
References:
1 Surveys by Jobvite.com and jobcast.net
2 Kiss, J. (2014). Facebook
by Steven Lindner | May 18, 2015 | Industry Research and Recruiting Metrics, Talent Acquisition |
One of the first questions recruiters often ask candidates is how they heard about the position. In recruiting, we call this the source of hire. This is the source from which the candidate came to apply for the position. More specifically, the source of hire is simply the source that led directly to a job application. But what lead the candidate to that source and what was it about the source that motivated the candidate to apply?
Job candidates are discovered through a variety of activities and sources: job ads and postings, social media postings, tweets, job fairs, e-mails, resume databases, networking, outreach, direct calls, referrals, LinkedIn, job boards, etc. You get the idea. Job seekers and potential job candidates are all around us and there are a multitude of ways to identify and attract talent to your organization.
When HR professionals refer to the metric source of hire they are most interested in the specific source that led to the candidates job application. The thinking is that if we know the specific source, then we can focus all of our recruitment efforts on those sources and eliminate spending money on all the other sources and recruitment activities.
As it turns out, the source candidates often list as the source of hire is not always the only source that led them to apply or the source that most motivated them to apply. Here at The WorkPlace Group we are able to track the recruitment channel that drove the candidate to us. For example, we can see that a candidate clicked on our indeed.com job posting and then applied to our recruiter position. However, their job application might list referral as the source of hire. In this very common example, which source would you count as the source of hire? Was it indeed.com or referral? Objectively we know it was indeed.com. However, the most influential source that motivated the candidate to apply was likely the referral.
How Does a Source Come to Attract the Attention of Candidates?
Lets start with the basic concept of priming. Psychologists describe priming as a memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. Two important aspects of priming are perceptual (first noticing the stimulus) and conceptual (attaching meaning to the stimulus). Priming is one way we come to associate words and symbols like the name of your company with its logo. For example, when you see the Golden Arches you know its McDonalds or if you hear the slogan Just Do it you think of Nike.
Priming is like effortless thinking – through repeat exposure to the pairing of words, symbols, and slogans, we come to automatically recognize, attach meaning and respond to them. For example, have you ever had the experience of feeling like you noticed something unique for the first time (like a car you are thinking of buying) and then all of sudden you notice it (the car) everywhere? The thing you never noticed before now seems quite common. You came to recognize it automatically, almost as automatic as breathing. It is so familiar that you no longer have to dig into your memory bank to recall it.
When we advertise job opportunities on multiple sites, across social media, through direct emails, networking and calls to candidates you get the idea we are priming candidates to respond (Van Hoye & Lievens, 2007). To prime the right, qualified candidates we need to repeatedly expose candidates to our job opportunities as well as manage the message so the right candidates respond and apply.
Create Positive Memories for Candidates
Candidates are more likely to apply to subsequent job opportunities and refer others to do the same when they are repeatedly exposed to positive messages about your company from multiple sources (Turban, 2001). Recruiters not only have the chance to expose candidates to the job or company, but they also have the opportunity to create positive memories for the candidates through positive recruiting efforts. In other words, the ball is in the court of the employer and recruiter when it comes to creating a positive recruitment experience and employer brand messaging for the candidate (see How Important is the Candidate Experience During the Hiring Process for more on this topic).
Consider the Value of All Sources of Hire
Rather than a source of hire, consider sources of hire. Identify sources that facilitate links to your career site or job application versus sources that influence or motivate candidates to apply in the first place. One without the other is like the chicken and the egg adage of what came first: some say the chicken, others say the egg. In either case, both are relevant, and without either, you wouldnt have a chicken – or in the case of recruitment, an applicant.
Recruitment analytics can help determine which sources are working for or against your investment. The WorkPlace Group has extensive experience working with recruitment analytics and helping clients determine where recruiting budgets should be focused in order to maximize each dollar spent. For more information about how to incorporate strategic recruiting analytics, please contact a WorkPlace Group associate today at https://www.workplacegroup.com/contact/.
Works Cited
Van Hoye, Greet, & Lievens, Filip. (2007). Social Influence of Organizational Attractiveness: Investigating If and When Word of Mouth Matters. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 37(9), 2024-2047. (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.2007.00249.x/abstract)
Turban, D. (2001). Organizational Attractiveness as an Employer on College Campuses: An Examination of the Applicant Population. Journal of Vocational Behavior. 58, 293-312.
