Pre-employment tests for Efficient Large-Scale Call Center Recruitment

Call centre recruitment is one of the largest recruitment-based process in most countries, especially when it is carried out in the Asia-Pacific region like India, China, Philippines and other countries. Large-scale recruitment within small time frames is typical of call center recruitment. Recruitment for call center roles consumes significant resources and time. Call center assessment tests relieve the hiring teams from the stress of screening hundreds of candidate profiles to narrow down potential employees.

Challenges in Call Centre Recruitment

Recruitment for customer service involves a lot of hard work. Jobs in the customer service sector can be cut-throat and require extensive hiring effort. Hiring managers have had to come up with aggressive hiring strategies to meet their recruitment goals for customer service roles. Additionally, maintaining lower attrition rates and ensuring high-quality hiring are also some of the challenges faced in call center recruitment.

The HR team is possibly the most stressed at this point when they have to shortlist a few from hundreds of candidates over a very short duration. Maintaining a low turnover rate while ensuring that the right talent is hired for open call center positions is the greatest challenge faced by recruiters.

High Turnover Rates: A job at a call center can be highly stressful. Working night shifts contribute to work stress. Handling irate customers is the main reason for the work stress of call center employees. Employees with high tolerance and patience levels alone can survive a job at the call center. Hiring managers are perpetually filling open positions due to employee turnover.
Filling Customer-facing Roles: Filling customer-facing roles is notoriously difficult simply because not many candidates are cut out for facing and handling customer grievances. Customer service representatives work to ensure high customer satisfaction and retention rates. This is not an easy feat considering the fact that they need to handle irate, frustrated, and angry customers. Filling customer-facing roles remains a challenge for the recruitment team.
Low Employee Engagement: Interaction at the workplace for customer service representatives is mostly with their computers/laptops. The nature of their work is such that they have very little time to interact with colleagues. This translates to poor employee engagement, which ultimately leads to higher attrition rates.
Limited Recruitment Budgets: Large-scale recruitment for customer service representatives are often allocated low budgets. Recruitment teams are faced with the challenge of conducting large-scale hiring drives for call center positions within small budgets. The call center selection process is often affected by these budget constraints.

Common Modes of Sourcing for Call Centre Job Positions

Sourcing candidate profiles for filling call center positions is as important as screening potential hires. The advertisements are usually promoted on a large scale and the most common platforms include,

Job portal
Job fairs
Television and Radio Ads
Campus interviews
Employee referrals
Branding

Setting up an Interview Team for Call Centres

Call center recruiting strategies are quite different compared to many other sectors because of the large number of requirements and candidates who walk in. Apart from the HR people making calls and creating interview schedules, they are also responsible for handling large groups of walk-ins and successfully choosing the right ones for the job.

Here is what to expect in the call center recruitment process:

Conduct written tests – Written tests are a time-consuming process that is now being slowly digitized. However, providing a computer for tens of candidates at once is difficult too which is why paper and pen is a preferred method.
Making candidates discuss – Group discussions are supposed to bring out the best but only the dominant of the group will talk more and he or she may not be a great performer in their job but still, they will clear the round. It is unreliable in many situations.
Final interview – The final round of interviews will be handled by team leaders and managers who want to see only the best. If something goes wrong at this point, the HR personnel is expected to rework their call center hiring process and start recruiting again.
Onboarding and initial training – One of the most time-spending and complex processes that HRs take care of. They have to make sure all documents are verified, candidate information is uploaded into the company servers and onboard them. They should also brief the new hires on team culture, and initial training and get them onboarded with the team members.

Redefining the Call Centre Recruitment with Call Centre Pre-Employment Assessment

Given the inherent challenges of the call center recruitment process, the question is how to overcome these challenges. The requirements in the job market are only going to increase by the minute, which further adds to the recruitment challenges. The recruitment team requires a hiring tool that can screen hundreds of candidate profiles within short durations to filter the most eligible of the lot.

This is where pre-employment skill assessments can lend a helping hand to the hiring team. Call center pre-employment testing is an effective and speedy way to screen candidates. Easy administration of the test through emails, a secure browser environment, instant reports and analytics, are just some of the features offered by skill assessment software. Online skill assessments provide a wide array of tests that cover various aspects of the candidate like job-related skills/knowledge, personality attributes, behavioral tendencies, cognitive abilities, reasoning and thinking abilities, etc.

A number of organizations are adopting skill assessments for accelerating the hiring process. For large-scale hiring requirements, pre-hire assessment tools are more effective than legacy hiring methods. Call center assessment testing overcomes the challenges in call center hiring. The market is flooded with numerous skill assessment software, and choosing the best among them can be quite a challenge. Here are the top features that one must look for in skill assessment tools:

Easy test administration: the skill assessment test must be easily administered via online links. The HR team must be able to send the test link to the candidates, located in any part of the globe, via email. The candidate should be able to open the test link at a convenient place and time.
Well-designed test format: the test format must be easily understandable. Interactive, easily readable, comprehensive, and engaging are some of the attributes for describing the test questions. Ideally, subject matter experts must design the questions to cover key skill topics. Tests like psychometry or cognitive ability must be designed as per the requirements of the role for which the candidate is being hired.
Customizable tests: the customized skill library to the role and skill. For example: call center assessments must include work simulation tests that evaluate the candidate’s ability to handle stressful work situations.
Reports and analytics: one of the main advantages of pre-employment assessments is the instant reports and analytics they provide for making informed hiring decisions. The details of a candidate’s performance must be instantly made available to the hiring team by way of easily readable reports and analytics. This data helps them make data-driven hiring decisions.
Fraud and cheating prevention: remote proctoring features are a must for online pre-employment assessments. The test must be conducted in a secure browser environment so that the online activity of the candidate is constantly monitored. The report on the online activity is provided to the hiring team to report any fraud or cheating activity.

Why is SkillRobo the Best Recruitment Method for Call Centres?

SkillRobo is an online skill assessment software that provides all of the above features to enable fast and efficient screening for call center roles.

With SkillRobo, you can expect,

Fastest turnaround time even with tens of candidates attending the interview at the same time
Easier to share as the assessment tool questionnaire can be shared online or digitally on any device
The highest level of security allows you to let test takers do it from any place on any device
Detailed reports and analytics allow HR team members to comfortably browse through candidates to find the best
Saves time, money and there is no need to have a large team of HR managers at work

The entire call center recruitment method can be changed for good because it is one of the industries where hiring happens throughout the year due to building requirements. At the same time, BPOs and KPOs no longer have to rely on a large number of employees which is not the most cost-efficient requirement solution. It helps eradicate human errors and simplify the entire recruitment process while improving the chances of hiring the best candidates who could stay for long as an asset to the company.

Checkout Skillrobo free trial to know how the software works and more of its features after which you can Sign Up as a customer.

Testing and assessment services are made easy for call centers so that they can handle a large number of walk-ins and also conveniently test candidates who are not physically present in the venue.

Let us know what kind of problems you encounter while recruiting in large numbers. Do you think an assessment tool will help in making the process more efficient?