Original Publication: Customer Management Insight - April 2008
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If you hire people for call centers or other high-volume positions, you know the stakes are high. New-hires typically require four to eight weeks of classroom training before they can take one call. If they quit or fail any necessary exams, that can represent a lost investment of $25,000 to $40,000 per employee. And that doesn’t include “soft costs,” such as lost opportunity, customer service or morale issues that arise from employee churn.
While there are many components to attracting and retaining top-quality employees, selecting the right people in the first place is critical. The good news is that assessment tools may help you dramatically improve your candidate selection process. In fact, when such tools are used along with a structured interview process and comprehensive training programs, retention rates can improve by up to 100 percent over a one-year period. (For a closer look at some of the agent assessment tools that are available, see The Science of Agent Selection: Assessment Tools Help Centers Find the Right Fit.)
If you are accountable for staffing call centers, you already know that the cost of employee turnover drops directly to the bottom line. For many centers, candidates need weeks of classroom training, and may need to pass licensing or product exams. In this environment, new employees who can’t master the material often need to be terminated. Or, even more frustrating, they decide they won’t like the job and quit.
The Inconsistency Challenge
Developing a stable call center workforce takes a lot of focus and the right combination of compensation, flexibility, supervision and career path. Typically, an attrition rate of 20 to 30 percent is considered good, but it’s not unusual to see turnover running at 100 percent or more. All the effort spent creating a good work environment won’t bear the desired results if you’re not selecting the right employees in the first place.
In a high-volume recruiting environment, establishing a consistent recruiting process can be a challenge, a fact that Diane H. Yarosis, national director of Client Services for Quest Diagnostics has firsthand experience with.
“We are an organization that has grown organically and through acquisition. Integrating and standardizing our operations is a priority for us. Building and implementing standardized hiring and training practices is vital to consistently delivering high-quality service,” Yarosis says.
While there is no silver bullet that will ensure that every call center candidate will be a perfect choice, years of industrial/organizational science clearly demonstrates the relationship between objective candidate assessments and predicting actual job performance.
According to Charles Handler, Ph.D., president of Rocket-Hire, “Objective candidate assessment means doing what you can to evaluate candidates through objective, rather than subjective, methods. Preemployment assessment tools help you make decisions based on data gathered about the candidate that is specifically relevant to the position.“
What’s more, administering such assessments is easier than ever, now that they are available online.
Balancing the Hiring Process
It is possible for companies to combine interviews and reference checks with the powerful tool of objective data to support hiring decisions. Companies that value the power of objective data to support hiring decisions use assessment tools. Such strategies have proven to be very effective, says Joseph P. Murphy, principal of Shaker Consulting Group.
“There is over 85 years of research that suggests assessment centers, work samples and simulations are some of the most effective methods of predicting on-the-job performance,” Murphy says. “The Web now allows work simulations and job tryouts to be conducted through an interactive, online experience.”
But Murphy reveals that surprisingly few companies take advantage of such tools.
“In spite of this evidence and the availability of very exciting resources, we still see a low adoption rate of even the most rudimentary best practices,” he says. “For example, almost all companies conduct interviews, yet only 24 percent claim to use behavioral rating scales with their interviews. The consequences are interviews with far less objective information to support candidate evaluation and decision-making.”
Quest Diagnostics is among the few companies using objective data with assessment tools as part of its hiring strategy.
“Our focus is on our customers experiencing a quality interaction with our company,” explains Yarosis. “Our call center representatives are required to have the medical and technical knowledge appropriate for speaking with physicians and other medical professionals on topics related to our broad array of diagnostic laboratory services. Preemployment objective assessments can be helpful not only in screening candidates for technical aptitude, but also in screening candidates for something that is equally, if not more, important — customer service attitude.”
Choosing the Right Assessment Tool
As useful as they are, there’s no denying that selecting the right assessment tool requires some careful thought.
At Fidelity Investments, for example, preemployment assessments are part of the hiring process to help determine if candidates have the aptitude to pass Series 6 & 7 NASD exams, which are job requirements. Brian Johnson, the firm’s executive vice president of Global Staffing, says his organization needs to be able to identify hard-to-target skills.
“We selected a tool that tests for cognitive ability,” Johnson says. “While we have used behavior-based interviewing for years, it’s very difficult to get at the candidate’s capability to study and pass exams. The assessment Fidelity selected has a fair amount of math-related problem solving, which is really at the heart of the customer service job.”
While there is a great deal of information available on the Web (including some excellent white papers and reports on the Society for Human Resource Management’s Web site: www.shrm.org), the most important sources of information are the users’ guides and validation analysis technical reports from the assessment providers you will be using. It is important to study the published validity documentation that relates to the specific skills and attributes required of your candidates. It is not enough for an assessment to have been used in a validation study. It is critical that the validation analysis is relevant to your hiring criteria. The best way to ensure an assessment will add value to your hiring process is to conduct an in-house validation analysis. This approach documents both the fairness of the hiring process and the economic impact from more effective hiring.
To select the right tool, your first task is to be clear about the job demands. A comprehensive job analysis is the foundation of choosing any assessment. As background for this, Murphy points to the requirement for job analysis spelled out in the EEOC’s Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures. “These guidelines specify that we establish relevance between the content of job and content of assessment. Job analysis provides the ‘shopping criteria’ to determine which assessments will measure the appropriate skills, characteristics and human attributes,” he says.
Deploying the Tool
Selecting the right tool also requires factoring in how it will be deployed in terms of recruiting logistics. According to Yarosis, “The ‘realistic job preview’ component of the assessment simulates the actual working environment for customer service positions. Successful completion of the assessment process can mean better preparation for the real job.”
Fidelity, on the other hand, needed a tool that would work in a high-volume recruiting process and that could show immediate evaluation results. “An online tool wouldn’t work for Fidelity’s call center recruiting,” says Johnson. “We often recruit in an ‘open-house’ format — that may be on a campus or in a hotel setting.
We selected a paper-based tool that is immediately scorable. This works in a high-volume recruiting environment when you may be screening hundreds of candidates.
Fidelity Investments got quick buy-in from line managers when it implemented a tool that screened effectively and was consistent. “They wanted a tool that would enable us to predict, with a high degree of accuracy, candidates who can pass the licensing exams,” reports Johnson. “Additionally, using the tool is consistent, equitable and fair to all candidates. It’s also efficient for our recruiters and hiring managers — we have one tool that is used by all recruiters and hiring managers nationally.”
Continually Improve The Recruiting Process
One of the key benefits of using assessments is that they offer a solid platform from which you can improve your company’s recruiting efforts. With an objective assessment, you will begin to gather hard data that you can analyze and use to refine your process, thereby continually improving accuracy in determining quality candidates.
Recommendations
Most companies already put tremendous effort into the workforce planning process for call centers. These plans are based on carefully refined and analyzed historical data, which allows managers to predict volume and establish performance metrics. Now it’s time to bring this same discipline into the selection process. There’s hard science that consistently demonstrates that preemployment assessments can help achieve a higher yield of more qualified candidates.
Job analysis offers a consistent way of understanding the skills and attributes required by a position — particularly the skills and attributes demonstrated by high-quality employees who choose to stay with your organization. As Johnson relates, “Training employees to prepare for licensing exams is very costly — in both time and money. Terminating employees because they don’t pass exams is something we want to avoid.”
While recruiting high volumes of employees is always a challenge, with the right assessment process, you can dramatically improve the quality of your candidates and reduce the tremendous waste associated with poor performance and high turnover. And, when management asks you hard questions, you’ll be in a position to show a pattern of consistent improvement — and back it up with hard data. That’s a good position to be in when the stakes are high.
Kate Donovan is Senior Vice President at Veritude. http://veritude.com
