A great CV or relevant credentials aren’t always enough – especially for call center positions, you want to see those call center candidates in action. Our internal assessment process for call center representatives involves extensive phone screenings where we test an individual’s rapport building, tonality, and objection handling. An efficient assessment confirms that a candidate is a good fit for your organization and possesses the skills they claim.
Call centers have some of the highest turnover of any sales or customer service role. That is why our personal ethos is to “ALWAYS be recruiting”. In the long term, an efficient screening process also ensures you’re able to hire the right candidates. This saves you money in the long term because your new reps are less likely to burn calls and turnover (which equate to roughly 20% of the staff member’s salary). The bottom line is that the upfront screening process is a wildly efficient way to improve and even prevent the high attrition rate associated with call center roles. Therefore, it’s essential to get the initial assessment stage right.
Here are a few of our top tips for assessing call center candidates.
- Try role-playing scenarios
Role-playing requires candidates to actively listen to a “customer’s” concerns and objections, thereby demonstrating their ability to understand and respond appropriately. If you’re interested in testing their problem-solving abilities, you can try throwing them some curveballs – for example, giving them some of the most common objections that are associated with your sale or process. Role-playing requires candidates to think on their feet and, consequently, is a popular staple of call center assessments – and an integral part of HyperHired’s screening process for call center reps.
- Multitasking Assessments
Multitasking – along with general agility – determines the ability of a call center agent to handle multiple tasks simultaneously without becoming flustered. A typical call center agent includes managing incoming calls, resolving customer issues, and updating customer records, all while adhering to specific timeframes and quality standards. Therefore, a strong multitasker can significantly boost efficiency and customer satisfaction in a fast-paced call center environment.
There are various online tools to measure multitasking. These gamified tasks typically involve switching between tasks while ignoring distractions. The advantage of this style of assessment is that the candidates get to play a game while you gain useful data.
Interviewing Call Center Candidates for Success
If the candidate has previous call center experience, you could try asking them for statistics about their previous work. For any candidate with sales experience, the first question we ask is “What’s the most you’ve made in a month?”. A true top-performing sales rep knows the answer to that question immediately.
If you’re recruiting for a customer service position, you could ask them about their average call handle time, first-call resolution rate, customer satisfaction ratings, and so forth.
Behavioral interviewing can be a helpful tool. If you ask open-ended questions about specific situations, actions, and results, you can measure how articulately and empathically candidates respond. Deeply engaging with a candidate will reflect their ability to think critically about customer service scenarios.
If you’re looking for the complete package, you could delve into their other achievements in their job. Examples of these achievements may include testing and introducing new processes or technologies at the previous call center, explaining how they contributed to improving the performance of their team, and so forth.
Either way, we recommend planning personalized questions and asking follow-ups if any of the answers they supply are unclear.
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Interested in learning more about hiring the best call center candidates in your area? HyperHired boasts a tried and true hiring method, with the results being target-smashing call center reps (we own and operate call centers of our own, and our team consists strictly of sales reps who understand the intricacies of the sales industry). We’re so confident in our hiring method that we back every placement with a written replacement guarantee — if a placed rep doesn’t work out within the guarantee window, we replace them at no additional cost.
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