What Is The Key To Quality Volume Hiring In Contact Centers?

Updated: October 19, 2023

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The world is constantly changing and the only thing that seems consistent is rapid innovation and increased dependency on technology to drive best-in-class business practices. Reliance on new technologies has further been fast-tracked by the Covid-19 pandemic, and this impacted every industry in every country across the globe.

Ineffective volume hiring in contact centers

Human Resource practices have changed too. New technologies have created opportunities for improving efficiency and making better use of the time and skills of HR professionals.

In the United States, it takes an average of 47 days to fill an open position, at an average cost of more than $4k. This is not surprising when you consider the time that a hiring team spends searching out talent, scheduling and conducting interviews with a large number of candidates, and then manually assessing each candidate to find the ones that best match the requirements. This process uses significant administrative resources, while still leaving the final selection largely reliant on gut instinct rather than data-driven decision-making.

Often such processes make sense when it comes to hiring for managerial or executive roles. These roles demand a wide range of skills and experiences and the successful candidate is usually expected to remain in the position for a number of years. However, when it comes to hiring a large number of people to fill a contact center, traditional hiring methods are simply too time consuming and inefficient.

The importance of volume hiring in contact centers

Hiring for contact centers is very different from hiring for other workplaces. Contact center jobs require agents to have excellent communication, customer service and problem-solving skills. These skills are difficult to convey on a resume and tough to assess through traditional screening methods. Additionally, these roles also have higher-than-average turnover. American contact centers have a 38% turnover rate, making it clear that the traditional, manual recruiting and screening process for volume hiring is resource-consuming and not an efficient approach.

Hiring a large number of skilled employees has its challenges. These include:

• ‍Lack of time: Manually interviewing and assessing candidates takes a lot of time and resources from HR teams that already have a lot of work to do‍
• Staying objective: Manual assessments done by multiple HR professionals leave a lot of the decision-making up to gut instinct‍
• Brand Management: When candidates are assessed manually it can be difficult to ensure that you are choosing the people who will represent your brand best‍
• Take Their Word For It: Having a candidate tell you they can do something is great, but watching them actually complete a task in a real-world assessment is better

Finding the best candidates for your contact centers

It takes the right people to staff a high-quality contact center. These contact center agents have demanding roles that include challenges like repetitive calls with frustrated customers, pressure to hit demanding sales quotas, and sitting for long periods of time. Some people are skilled communicators that can easily master the demands of a contact center job, and some people are not, and evaluating the difference can be very difficult.  

The right contact center employees have excellent communication skills. They understand the importance of listening to customer concerns and showing empathy when helping to troubleshoot problems. They have a positive attitude, they know how to stay calm under pressure, they have good attention to detail and have the ability to understand the customer’s problem without asking them to repeat it multiple times.

Hire the right people the first time

Using a third-party solution to streamline your volume hiring for contact centers will help your team in the following ways:

• ‍Save Time: Automating the process saves HR teams time, allowing them to spend more resources meeting with candidates that meet the job requirements‍
• Be Objective: A consistent assessment that is applied to each candidate allows you to make data-driven hiring decisions instead of relying on what you feel is the right move‍
• See In Action: Online platforms run the candidates through real-world scenarios, so you can see how they perform before they come on board

How do these third-party solutions work? They help assess the skills of the candidates that are required on the job and give managers a detailed report of metric-driven data points to act on. Plus, they rank candidates against one another based on soft skills like language and psychometric tests.

Partnering with a third-party solution to automate your volume hiring assessment process allows you to screen candidates at a far more detailed and relevant level while using fewer internal resources. And while the concept of volume hiring may seem impersonal, it can actually increase the amount of time a recruiter can spend with the candidates who scored well in their assessments.

Contact center agents spend 99% of their time communicating. No matter how effective your training programs may be, hiring agents that lack the proper communication skills and other basic job readiness qualifiers sets them, and the rest of their team up for failure. Customer service is more important and more difficult than ever before. Covid-19 has changed the way people interact with businesses. The pandemic has shifted communications away from face-to-face interactions and increased the focus on online and telephone-based communication. Plus, wide consumer uncertainty has caused increased stress for both agents and their customers. A successful contact center must be staffed with people who can communicate effectively in this heightened environment.

What to do for efficient volume hiring in contact centers?

Metrics delivered by AI-powered assessments can provide the information you need to quickly make data-driven hiring decisions. For example, the HiringBranch framework assesses more than just language skills.  The framework uses call, chat and email conversation simulations to measure a candidate’s ability to converse with customers, then uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze the results and ensure that the candidates you hire have a positive attitude, attention to detail, a focus on quality and the ability to listen to their customers and solve their problems thoroughly and efficiently. Not only does this help you assess whether a person is a right fit for the job based on their skill set, job readiness, and personality, but it also gives the candidate a realistic preview of what to expect if they are selected for the position. The results are objective and candidates know exactly what they are signing up for before they start.

By automating these assessments you transition into a process that selects the right candidates based on data generated by a metric-driven framework.