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Poor Hiring Processes Are Hurting Your Bottom Line - Here's A Checklist Of Things That You Can Do To Improve

by Jim Lowe, President, HireFX Incorporated - October 2, 2015

Poor hiring processes are hurting your bottom line - Here’s a checklist of things that you can do to improve.

By Jim Lowe

President, HireFX Incorporated

Call Center Recruiting Experts


Your call center’s profits can easily be hurt in the summer by high recruitment costs, unacceptable employee turnover rates, and under-performing new hires. Too many call centers simply accept high turnover as “the cost of doing business”, rather than focussing on ways to better source, select, and retain quality employees. Despite competing in a modern industry that invests cutting edge equipment, technology, and CRM software, many call center employers have antiquated and inefficient approaches to hiring their front-line staff.

Hiring a new employee can be a long and labour intensive process for many organizations, and selecting the wrong candidate generates disastrous results. There are thousands on online job boards available - which one do you choose? How do you promote your opening to attract the best candidates and select who to spend interview time with? Most critically, how do you separate your future star performers from the disasters in waiting?

A professional, process-based approach to hiring can have a dramatic impact on your call center’s short and long term human capital success.

Here’s a checklist of things that you can – and should – be doing to improve your call center’s recruitment process.

1) Establish and support your Employment Brand – Job seekers often equate call center employment with “annoying telemarketers”. Overcome this with website content that talks about the types of calls your employees handle and the positives of your work environment.

2) 365 Sourcing – Advertising only when you have a set start date is costing you good candidates! Have a process that is always open for applications and use free sources such as employer directories to promote the application. You’ll still want to ramp up the ads during peak recruitment times, but this will ensure that you don’t miss out on a candidate because they were looking for work “at the wrong time”. Don’t forget to leverage your existing social media channels – people love to share/like/retweet/pin!

3) Don’t just scan, screen – Do you remember the old term “garbage in, garbage out”? Scanning resumes for key words is ineffective because, candidates with weaker resume skills may not include the right content. The best way to get the right data from candidates is to use a sophisticated online application tool that directly collects the information you need.

4) Hire for fit – Hiring decisions are often made based on “what a candidate has done”, rather than “what the new employee will do”. By incorporating behavioral profiling and skills assessments into your hiring process, you’ll better understand a potential employee’s strengths and weaknesses. Knowing how the candidate will fit into both the position and your call center will allow you to make the right hiring decision with confidence!

5) Don’t ignore the data – Perhaps the most valuable part of a process-driven approach to hiring is the ability to review all of the data you’ve collected to identify trends and areas for improvement. Take the time to review your successes and failures, then use the data to fine-tune your hiring process moving forward.

Call Center employees are “the voice” of your organization and play a critical role in client satisfaction. Your center can invest in the latest technology and slickest software but it cannot succeed if the “people factor” is mired in poor quality hires and crushing turnover rates.

Jim Lowe is President of HireFX Incorporated, a leading supplier of call center recruitment tools. With two decades of dynamic human resources experience, Jim is the architect of HireFX's cutting-edge human capital solutions and has designed systems that have processed more than one million job applications for call centers around the world.

Twitter - @hirefx

LinkedIn - https://ca.linkedin.com/in/jimlowe

 
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