Since the product call centers provide is customer service, their success depends largely on the quality of their agents. Call center hiring—identifying and retaining agents with the appropriate skills and capabilities—is therefore recognized as a key area of investment.

Yet it hasn’t always been so.

“Although labor is 65-70 percent of the call center, years ago there wasn’t much focus on how to get the right person in there,” notes Jeff Furst, President and CEO of FurstPerson, in a video about call center hiring. “That’s changing.”

One reason for the change is that technological advances make it much easier than in the past to develop effective call center hiring practices.

“The automation enabled by the internet has really made the recruiter’s life a lot easier,” Furst points out in the video.

FurstPerson, founded in 1997 as a Chicago-area temporary staffing solutions provider for call centers, specializes in call center hiring solutions. It does that by applying its many years of experience in the industry to develop systems that help call centers and contacts centers identify the right people to hire, using web-based account management and acquisitions solutions.

This approach has been used successfully for home-agent and brick-and-mortar call centers in the U.S., U.K., Latin America, Philippines and elsewhere.

“Many of the hiring challenges we see in the United States apply on a global level, although there are some differences depending on the market,” Furst notes in the video.

Furst explained that there are two main aspects of successful call center hiring:

• Creating good foundational elements around hiring
• Standardizing and automating processes that calibrate hiring models with performance

“We spend a great deal of time helping our clients improve the quality of hire decision,” Furst noted. “We also spend a lot of time looking at ROI and modeling different elements. In general, a dollar invested with our solutions yields $5 to $20 back.”