The best practices to recruit talented and long-term call center employees
Recruitment, in general, is not an easy task—especially in a market full of “we are hiring” posts and job seekers ready to apply for any job, even if they’re not sure about meeting its requirements.
For the call center position, the task is even more difficult. It requires finding skilled employees who can answer your customers’ queries and handle their problems in the best way.
However, people consider the call center job, also known as answering service, as an easy job that anyone can do and consider it a very short-term job.
So, we will provide you with an ultimate guide for “contact center recruiting strategies” to help you get the best candidates who meet your requirements in the long term.
1) Choose the right platform to recruit:
There are many platforms to announce a job vacancy. However, you need to choose wisely the platforms that will give you better results and save your effort, time, and budget. Here are some efficient platforms you can use:
For social media:
- Facebook:
Even though Facebook isn’t always for job seekers, its popularity makes it an efficient choice for publishing your job posts.
According to Shopify, Facebook is the most popular social media platform, with 2.93 billion active users in 2022.
Targeting the groups dedicated to job vacancies will make your job posts more efficient and ensure that many job seekers see them.
And don’t worry if you received an enormous number of applications. Velents call center recruitment software will help you filter all CVs and get only the relevant ones.
So, you can ensure having a good number of qualified candidates without the hassle of manual screening.
- Linkedin:
On the other hand, Linkedin is used by professionals who seek jobs and want to highlight their experience and skills.
It’s the best social media platform where job seekers show that they are open to work and share their experience, and the certifications they earned.
You may also find their former managers publish reviews about them and endorse their skills.
- For sites:
The first site you should consider is your site. It may have little traffic, but it’s the best platform to express yourself and write about the job in more detail.
You can rely on direct traffic to the website or push the page’s URL to job seekers through job posts on social media.
There are sites dedicated to job seekers and employers, such as Wuzzuf, Jobzella, and Akhtaboot, as paid platforms. Or free ones like Wazayf and Google for Jobs.
2) Understand why you lose employees:
Rule of thumb: one of the most effective strategies to define the areas you would like to develop is learning from the past.
A primary problem for the call center industry is the high turnover rate. So, it’s essential to know why your employees leave the company and what is the call center recruitment strategy you need to focus on to attract new candidates and retain them as employees.
Here are some causes of call center turnover and how to resolve them:
– Employees decided to leave:
You then should conduct exit interviews to know their reasons that may be:
1) The pressure of both company and customers:
We often bear the burden of work because of the work environment, but if the work environment is toxic, why should the employee stay?
You must create a better work environment and keep in mind that candidates assess you the same as you do. They will ask your employees about the workplace environment before they accept your offer.
A recent study published in 2021 “Healthy Workspaces: Strategies for Increasing the Indoor Environmental Quality at Call Centre Interiors for Employee Well-being and Productivity” indicates that better designed interior spaces in call centers companies enhance the health and well-being of the employees, resulting with higher performance and service quality.
2) The training is not enough:
Sometimes you could hire inexperienced candidates at the beginning of their career if they have the skills you need.
So, consider training your employees and showing that on social media to attract more candidates who are eager to learn.
3) They get a better offer:
You need to conduct a competitive analysis to know if your company’s salaries are competitive enough to attract and retain the best employees.
– You decided to fire them:
If you terminated employees, your hiring decision might be wrong from the beginning —maybe because of poor assessment.
In the future, you must be careful when assessing your candidates and consider testing them from different aspects.
3) Engage Your Existing Agents:
One of the most needed call center recruitment strategies is to make the best of your existing agents.
Your current employees are one of the most efficient means to attract the best candidates for your vacancies. But how can they help you?
- Your existing agents were the candidates of the past. They can give you valuable insights into how your current and future candidates will interact with your job announcement.
- Ask them what they thought when they saw your job announcement and whether the company met their expectations later.
- Also, let them check your job posts before publishing. This will help you evaluate the posts from the candidates’ perspective.
- Ask them what skills your candidates should have. Agents are your company’s frontline. They deal with all types of customers, including aggressive and impatient ones. Thus, they are aware of the skills that your company really needs.
- Ask them for recommendations. They may have good candidates in their network seeking a call center job, and these recommendations have two advantages:
1. They will introduce your company in an excellent way to their recommended candidates, which will make them excited to join your company.
2. They know the job back to front! So they will recommend candidates with the required skills.
4) Introduce your company to the candidates:
Don’t let their first interaction with the company and its employees be on the interview day. Encourage the candidates to work in your company even before they go through the interviewing process. Here are two ideas that could help you do that:
A- Inviting candidates to the office:
Sometimes what we read in the job ad is not what we get. So, let candidates visit the office to:
- See their future office and all provided facilities.
This will keep them excited to get accepted into the job and make them feel they belong to your company.
- Speak with other employees.
When the candidates speak to your employees, they will:
- Reveal their worries and ask more questions, simply because they will trust employees more than the HR managers
- Make friendships with their future colleagues.
B- Posting regular videos:
This strategy is a long-term strategy. It’s about posting videos that show the internal environment of your company. In addition, videos can clarify the job responsibilities of the call center position, the type of problems they may face, and how they can deal with them.
This will help you build an employer brand reputation and familiarize future candidates with your company and the job duties before even going into the hiring process.
5) Build the proper assessment tests:
The contact center job is about communicating with people round-the-clock, not to receive praise and make relationships but to hear their problems.
Usually, when we have problems, our behavior changes. Accordingly, customer service employees must have the skills to handle customers and restrain themselves under the stress of angry and abusive customers.
So, you need to conduct personality and cognitive assessments before choosing the right person.
- Personality assessment:
It helps you know candidates’ values, principles, ideologies, and motivations. Analyzing those elements is essential, not only for handling customers, but also for helping you deal with them as employees.
- Cognitive Assessment:
It helps you evaluate their problem-solving skill—the most significant skill in the call center.
It also enables you to discover their memory ability. Customers don’t like to repeat their problems. They need someone to remember their inquiries and to pay attention to details.
6) Write clear effective job description
As mentioned above, call center hiring involves two main challenges. Firstly, the job you’re hiring for is not easy at all. It requires specific skills and abilities that not everyone has. Secondly, it has one of the highest turnover rates. So, you need to help your employees to like their jobs and your company.
That needs you to be clear from the very beginning. You must tell the candidates about their responsibilities and the skills they should have. This will surely decrease the number of applicants, but at least it will generate more qualified candidates.
Write a clear job description that includes all the responsibilities, the required skills and responsibilities, and the working hours. Also, you can add the answers to the frequently asked questions by the candidates on your website.
7) Increase the efficiency of your hiring process
In today’s world, the hiring process is not confined to HR employees anymore. Most of the process can be done through recruitment software that can help you in many tasks, such as:
- It helps you get a sufficient number of relevant CVs, so don’t worry about candidate sourcing anymore.
- It solves the problem of irrelevant CVs as it filters all CVs according to pre-identified keywords for the required jobs.
- It also conducts the interviews on your behalf.
How can that help you?
- Save your time: recruitment software acts like an HR assistant, conducting all recruiting processes and preparing reports for you to make the final decision.
- Save your Budget: the top recruitment software provides a database for candidates. You don’t need to pay for sponsored ads and recruitment agencies.
- Speed up the hiring process: when most of the process gets done automatically, the hiring process will go faster, and the company will get what it needs in a shorter time.
In Conclusion, the call center has many problems regarding hiring new employees and retaining them but can be resolved by making an excellent plan and being committed to implementing it. It will take time, but it will also work and give the desired results.