What's the best way to hire contact center agents?

This is one of those “how long is a string?” questions. There is no one answer. Of course, it depends on what your contact center's goals are, and what skills you need from agents to accomplish those goals. So how do you know what skills are the best to test for in potential agents and, more important, how do you test for them?

Call center technology company FurstPerson (www.furstperson.com) has some answers, based on a new study (http://pages2.furstperson.com/IQPC-ContactBabel-Guide-offer.html) called the 2011 U.S. Contact Center Decision Makers’ Guide conducted by British research group ContactBabel (News - Alert) (http://www.contactbabel.com/) and sponsored by FurstPerson. The report, which covers issues of contact center personnel, processes and technology, is based on extensive interviews with 209 contact centers across a broad number of industry groups and agent size. The goal was to provide insight into how different contact centers perceive their industry, including its recruitment and hiring practices. From the results of the report and its own extensive experience in the contact center industry, FurstPerson has extrapolated a number of hiring best practices.

For starters, says FurstPerson, it's impossible to rely solely on a face-to-face interview. While this first personal interview is critical – it helps you understand the candidate's level of energy, general knowledge and whether he or she has an attitude that will fit into your company culture – it won't tell you much about the individual's skills and abilities, which is where more customized hiring techniques must come in.

For starters, simulations, personality assessments and cognitive ability tests all outperform the face-to-face interview when it comes to accurately measuring candidates’ qualifications and predicting which candidates will demonstrate better on-the-job performance, said FurstPerson. The ideal approach is a combination of these assessments plus an interview. This enables the hiring manager to measure work habits (interview), work attitudes (personality), work ability (cognitive), and work skills (simulation).

The goal, of course, is to hire the right agents, which will minimize turnover and save the supervisors' time and energy. In the long run, better hiring practices via the use of technology will save a contact center money. Taking the time to conduct an empirically based analysis of the job, identify the competencies required for success in that job, and then match the right hiring tools to evaluate job candidates on those competencies enables the organization to select talent based on real performance drivers. The net result is better new hire retention and job performance that can be quantified into a business case.

For more information and to read the full ContactBabel report, visit http://www.furstperson.com/blog/?p=505.