Version 2
Guidelines for Writing Effective Job Announcements
Here are some guidelines to attract and excite talented people:
1. Use an enthusiastic tone. Don’t use a staid, administrative tone. Information about the job, skills required, and so on can be presented to inspire and excite. The two ads illustrate difference in tone.
- Start with the title. The title “Help Our Winning Team with Customer Care Solutions!” is lively. It exudes more passion and enthusiasm about being on a team, winning, and providing solutions to others. It piques interest.
- Avoid negatives. The word “no” can be chilling. The phrase, “No phone calls, please” has a slight negative feel, even with the adjoining word, “please.” Why not rephrase with an upbeat “Learn more about this opportunity” and list a web link?
- Avoid cold words. The term “job requisition number,” for instance, is bureaucratic and unfriendly. Use neutral phrasing, such as that in Version 2, with the necessary reference number.
2. Highlight benefits, benefits, benefits. The ad needs to communicate benefits to attract and excite. Go-getters want to be challenged and grow with the job. Listing administrative details does the opposite. Notice how Version 2 gets into…
- Personal benefits — working with winners. It includes references to award-winning company, most widely read local newspaper, high reputation and gaining satisfaction from helping others. This is all true information, but Version 1 neglected it.
- Work benefits — It makes a point of listing benefits for employees — paid training, working with current technology and supportive management. Version 1 is one-sided and only focuses on what the new hire must do for the center; there is no spirit of win-win.
3. Leave out excruciating details. The ad should be informative but leave out unnecessary information. Too much minutiae creates a feeling of a mud puddle and slows down excitement. The detailed information can come later in the application process.
4. Start broad; end narrow. An exciting ad starts with lofting themes, not routine information. The broad themes catch people’s eye. Version 2 starts with themes of challenge!, working with winners!, and satisfaction with success! Then it slowly narrows by the end of the ad to specifics on qualifications for the ideal candidates and how to apply for the job. This approach generates enough early interest to lure people through the narrow details to learn how to apply.
5. Keep all information fresh. Ads annoy applicants when the information is no longer applicable. The biggest goof is allowing it to run when the job has been filled. The lack of timeliness is disrespectful to the job seekers’ time and creates a bad image of laziness or insensitivity by your center. The best ads are reliable and timely with up-to-date information.
Enhance the Careers Section of Your Corporate Web
People spend a considerable amount of time on the Internet for entertainment, business, socializing and looking for a job. Regardless of why an individual has come to your corporate site, you can take the opportunity to recruit them.
Why are Web site visitors good recruiting targets? LIMRA’s research has consistently found that candidates who visit the employment section of corporate Web sites are higher-quality candidates than job board applicants. These individuals know something about your organization — they have purchased your products, used your services or looked for information on your site. The relationship involves interest, attraction (remember, they came to your site) and trust. The possibility of working for your company can attract both active and passive job seekers. In effect, individuals who come to the employment section of your Web site are “virtual” walk-in candidates — they are motivated and familiar enough with your organization to approach it.
Make your employment site attractive and helpful to Web site visitors:
1. On your home page, clearly showcase a banner or click-through button advertising “Employment Opportunities with Us!” Make it conspicuous and engaging so potential job seekers will easily find and act on it.
2. Make it easy to navigate to and within the employment section of your site. Clear and simple navigation is key.
3. Use the site to preview the work environment. Include “snapshots” of your call center. Have reps describe their work through text, photos and video clips.
4. If browsing individuals are interested, get them to start the application process immediately! Use prescreening assessment (see next section) to help prequalify applicants.
5. Provide quick, personal responses to applicants who take the initiative to reach out to you.
6. Capture candidate information ensuring that if there is no current opening, you can follow up when there is one.
Screen Agent Applicants While Recruiting
Recruiting success can be a double-edged sword. Here’s an example that might be familiar to you. A call center posts a job announcement on several Internet job boards. The ad casts a wide net and a flood of electronic resumes pour in. It’s great to have all these job applicants when past recruiting generated less interest. But these resumes represent people with different levels of qualifications and talent. The arrival of these resumes means careful evaluation comes next. The burst of attraction also means assessment overload!
You can control your recruiting flow efficiently by screening applicants during recruiting, not after the resumes have arrived.
Screen for factors that represent minimum qualifications and are easy to identify. Check for: 1) red flags (e.g., gaping holes in work history chronology, pattern of job hopping, employment that doesn’t seem to match the individual’s background, etc.), and 2) meeting conditions of employment (able to work permanently in the United States; reliable transportation, shift availability and so on). This initial screening should be quick, inexpensive, and require little or no management resources. By spending a little time up front screening out applicants, you save a lot of time and money that would have been spent processing and evaluating each and every one.
This early assessment helps you efficiently and effectively create a manageable pool of reasonably qualified candidates.
The Pitfalls of Screening Resumes
Some call centers start the screening process with the resume. Whether reviewed by humans or scanned by word-search software, screening this way can yield questionable results.
If you aren’t already familiar with word-search technology, these software systems quickly scan electronic resumes for specific words or phrases of interest to the call center. They take the pressure off your HR staff by doing what would be otherwise time consuming and tedious to humans.
Unfortunately, reviewing resumes either by humans or high technology suffer from two big shortcomings.
1. The (un)truthfulness of resumes. Resumes are not legal documents like application blanks. While applicants must attest to the truthfulness of the information they provide on application forms, resumes often receive looser treatment. The resume’s truthfulness, the information included and information excluded are all controlled by the individual. It is no surprise that some people fudge work qualifications and use ambiguous or fluffy phrases. Resumes have, unfortunately, earned a reputation as “great works of fiction.”
2. Incomplete or confusing content. Since applicants decide what to include and exclude from their resumes, you may not get information necessary to make a decision on basic qualifications. A good example is the formal declaration of reliable transportation to your center. It’s never offered in a resume. But you need that information. Some people may pass this qualification in the resume review, even though you find out later they don’t meet this criteria and are screened out. Another problem is confusing statements. For example, “expert in customer relations management” is incomplete information. You don’t have the ability to clarify this important statement so people with this statement once again pass the resume evaluation. Later you find this statement is totally unrelated to your center’s needs.
Early Screening on Relevant Qualifications
The ideal early screen collects information that you need to qualify people on the most basic hiring criteria. Your early assessment system should overcome the inherent problems of the resume but offer convenience to applicants. Here is one strategy: Have interested individuals go onto the employment opportunities section of your Web site. Individuals then complete an employment application form. In this method you are able to:
1. Ask for the information you need to know.
2. This information is uniformly and consistently collected from every applicant.
3. Ask in a way that eliminates subjectivity and ambiguity.
4. Control the level of detail needed. For example, if you want names of IT systems, ask for them.
Here are benefits of controlling your early screen:
1. All information is relevant. You ask for only what you want. The recruiter does not have to wade through unnecessary or tangential information.
2. Since you control how information is asked, there is less opportunity for fluff, ambiguity and other acts of quasi-fiction.
3. Because all applicants answer the same questions and same level of detail, you can compare applicants at this early stage.
4. Because the information is objective and entered online, software can “score” the application form almost instantly. This allows you to rank the respondents from most to least qualified quickly and objectively.
5. All in all, this method reduces time requirements by recruiters or hiring managers in early screening, leaving more time for in-depth evaluation of individuals who deserve to be evaluated. Evaluation can start with the applicant ranked as the “most qualified” in this online assessment system.
Final Thoughts
Using sound recruiting practices builds a pool of quality applicants that you can evaluate to hire talented individuals who will stay with you. Unfortunately, many call centers feel an overwhelming urgency to fill empty seats. Too often, this urgency trumps quality and recruiting becomes a numbers game — quickly getting as many people as possible to apply. The urgency to hire is so great that good hiring practices are skipped. A manager once told me, “I’d rather have a bad hire than an empty seat.” He was a very frustrated manager. No wonder. He also lamented about his revolving door of agents coming and going. He was recruiting any warm body to fill seats, keep the center going and hope for the best.
This “any warm body” recruiting philosophy may solve a short-term problem, but it is not a sustainable solution. The long-term pain overwhelms any short-term benefit of a center with filled seats. The cycle is both predictable and self perpetuating: Individuals hired hastily perform poorly, disrupt work operations and leave quickly. It requires continuous resources to recruit, hire and train. The result is draining in the long run with no resolution in sight.
Successful recruiting programs prioritize the quality of recruits over the sheer speed or numbers of applicants. Practices such as rebranding your agents’ job and using employee referrals are proven methods for attracting quality applicants (see Job Brands: Changing Applicant Reactions to Your Openings). They result in quality hiring that improves individual productivity, customer satisfaction ratings, sales results and workforce turnover.
SIDEBAR
How to Develop and Maintain an Effective Employee Referral Program
Give your team a success profile that differentiates qualified candidates from unqualified ones. Your better agents may have an idea of what they should be looking for, but a well-crafted document can highlight important skills, abilities and personal characteristics.
Provide guidelines on how to…
- Start the conversation about working in a call center. Provide easy phrases to help your agents bring up the topic and converse in a friendly way.
- Describe the job. This could be packaged in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) sheet to help your agents keep on message.
- Apply for the job. Provide your agents with a guide on how referrals should apply for the job.
Offer a meaningful monetary reward. Using money rewards may make you cringe, but the business logic is straightforward: You are motivating part-time recruiters (agents) to cull through possible candidates to find really good applicants on their own time; the cost is less than Internet advertising costs and payroll costs for recruiters to cull through a pile of electronic resumes. This type of recruiting program can have significant return on investment.
Monetary rewards should be…
- Contingent on a successful hire. If the center pays for any referral that just shows up, then you’re paying just for a warm body, not a successful new-hire. Your criteria for pay-out comes when the referral completes training or when he/she stays three months on the job.
- Large enough to motivate participation. Is a $50 reward a strong incentive? Not like a $1,000 pay off! Agents will perceive the big bucks amount as a real bonus, not a token “thank you.” With a token reward, agents will be slow to act and back off when the going gets tough. A good monetary reward is a win-win amount that rewards the referrer and delivers a quality hire.
Encourage your top reps to participate. The program should be open to all agents. But nudge your top agents to participate. Good workers typically know other good workers.
Institutionalize the program. Make it SOP (standard operating procedure).
- New-hire orientation. Discuss the program with new employees starting in your center. New-hires will get the message that this program is a priority. Also, new-hires may know other quality individuals who are looking for work. You can collect these contacts while the job search is still going.
- Include program status in department meetings. This shows the program is important enough to be a regular agenda item. It also provides an opportunity to gather feedback on how things are going. Is there frustration in getting referrals? You can intervene and help — this might include instilling realistic expectations on the long time required to find a good referral.
- Itemize in your budget! This is the acid test regarding buy-in from upper management. If senior management doesn’t support it with money in your budget, it will be very difficult to keep the program operating.
- Reward supervisors for good agent referrals. People focus on work activities that are rewarded and expend less energy on those that are not rewarded. Recognizing supervisors with successful programs will energize them.
Maintain metrics on the program
- Track new-hire success rates by recruiting source.
- Measure program participation rates and individual successes.
- Measure manager and agent satisfaction with the referral program.
