Call center hiring is one of the most important steps within the call center to ensure optimal performance. This industry is notoriously famous for high attrition, low employee morale and exorbitant recruiting and training costs as a result of that high attrition. In a recent FurstPerson white paper, the introduction of a new product to address the challenge of agent turnover in the call center was examined.

This product, CC Audition Talk & Note is designed to leverage speech technology in order to create a highly realistic contact center simulation environment. This latest call center hiring solution uses speech input and advanced call documentation to produce a candidate assessment that will closely resemble performance in the actual work environment. 

To facilitate effective call center hiring, the call center needs to leverage candidate assessment technologies. In a survey conducted by the National Association of Call Centers (NACC), an offshoot of the Call Center Lab at the University of Southern Mississippi, findings indicate that agent or new hire attrition was a very important issue in 55.6 percent of call centers. Survey responses also revealed that 84.3 percent of the industry considers turnover and attrition as an important issue.

The survey also asked respondents about their hiring intensions for the next year and found that 34.2 percent of respondents plan to add more agents to their team. Another 60.8 percent plan to hire agents only to replace those agents who leave the call center as a result of attrition. Hiring freezes are planned at only 5.1 percent of locations, indicating that hiring activity will continue to be a primary focus over the next year.

Call center hiring solutions that are deployed in the pre-employment phase can ensure that those candidates offering the greatest potential for success in the call center are identified for the hiring process. Marginal or weaker candidates are then weeded out of the process before management time and training dollars are invested. This ensures that the call center experiences the greatest return on investment (ROI) from the hiring solution.

The highly interactive FurstPerson CC Audition suite of products is designed to bring a significant degree of precision and objectivity to what could otherwise be a haphazard and subjective process. With the FurstPerson simulation process, agent candidates can also gain a better understanding of the job requirements beyond the written description and hiring managers can better evaluate each candidate’s performance before they make the investment in hiring and training the candidate.