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Call Centers Ramping Up Hiring

By TMCnet Staff

For most companies, hiring is a cyclical process. Employees leave, and they need to be replaced, usually just a few at a time (one hopes). For contact centers, hiring is a constant process, often because of the high turnover in the industry. In some cases, however, companies must ramp up new call centers quickly, and in these cases, they must engage in mass hiring.

The U.S. call center industry, after taking years of hits when the recession first began in 2008, seems to be looking brighter as of late (perhaps because of jobs returning home from being outsourced abroad). Many companies that were laying people off a few years ago are now taking on call center agents in large numbers.

Cruise line Royal Caribbean International recently announced that it will be hiring about 220 additional call center agents at its Springfield, Ore., facility. The call center, which opened in 2006 and was slated to have 1,000 employees by 2009, instead was forced to backtrack on those plans when the Great Recession hit. The facility, which now employs 719 agents, is currently at between 65 and 70 percent capacity, according to a recent article in the local newspaper The Register (News - Alert)-Guard.

The contact center will need to have its newest employees in place and trained by January, which is when peak cruise season begins as cold-weary Americans look to book warm-weather vacations. But taking on over 200 new agents and training them effectively is no small feat if you hope to prepare them to represent your company adequately.

Mass hiring is a fact of life in the contact center industry. Companies frequently open new offices or ramp up existing offices to meet peak demand for clients with seasonal business. During these times, processes can get rushed, and contact centers often wind up with many unsuitable employees. They are later then forced to terminate and replace those employees during busy times.

For this reason, smart contact centers are putting better and more intelligent hiring processes into place. This means telephone interviews, automated processes and online testing, in many cases. Effective hiring solutions also use predictive analytics to match up companies with the candidates that would suit them best, helping bring down costs and speed up the hiring process, ensuring that the most suitable candidates with the right communications skills are chosen.

These solutions can drastically reduce recruitment costs and keep the hiring process humming. Companies can now virtually interview candidates with video and audio technologies, so individuals within the company can view and listen, and collaborate among themselves to make a decision. The solution can customize the interview flow using analytics to identify the best candidates. Reporting options make it easy for hiring managers to see precisely what they need to see to choose candidates.

It’s a way of eliminating the time-consuming and expensive face-to-face interview process, which (let’s face it) yields a number of unsuitable candidates. Companies can streamline their hiring process, save money and at the same time ensure they are hiring the best possible workers.