In business, recruiting the right people can make all the difference between success and failure. Most organisations spend upwards of £4,000 filling a position, yet the results vary widely. Properly designed Assessment Centres can help to achieve outstanding returns from investment in recruitment - delivering effective and motivated people.
Spending Your Budget Effectively
Assessment Centres are widely recognised as a powerful means of assessing candidates in competencies vital to organisational success. Assessment Centres can form part of a reliable and objective means of allowing you to assess whether the candidate can demonstrate their skills and experience, and can provide an accurate profile of an individual's skills, abilities and style of working.
Tools such as Assessment Centres also offer candidates and employees the opportunity to prove their capabilities, develop their strengths and identify areas of comparative weakness.
However, prior to spending your valuable time and money on setting up an Assessment Centre, it is imperative to understand and be realistic about the Contact Centre industry as a whole. Many organisations employing high numbers of Call Centre staff will more often than not experience high levels of attrition. It is a ‘collective’ issue, but a realistic one – the industry is extremely transient, as an increase in salary elsewhere can effect a huge transition of staff; there are often fewer career opportunities in such a pyramid structure sector; and it can often be extremely repetitive and pressurised if sales and customer service targets are not met.
Organisations are often so focused on attracting and identifying the ‘right’ candidate at recruitment stage that they fail to focus & provide necessary funds on retaining staff once they have commenced employment. Improving employee retention is a key issue for every organisation and is based upon the following beliefs:
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It is difficult for employers to retain good employees if they do not have a process to hire the right people in the first place.
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Retention processes must directly support the reasons that successful, satisfied employees stay.
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Good induction, training, development, succession planning and most importantly effective management can have a huge effect on overall attrition rates .
Therefore, before you embark on timely and often expensive assessment centres make sure you take a holistic view at your overall employee strategy and spend your budget accordingly!
Identify the Right Assessment Criteria
Firstly, consider that retention processes must directly support the reasons that successful, satisfied employees stay. Take some time to really understand the existing workforce in order to identify talent during the recruitment process.
Utilise personality and motivation profiling on your existing employees in order to:
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Identify the optimum personality and motivation profile for Customer Sales and Service Advisors.
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Understand which personality types are suited to sales roles and which are better suited to service roles.
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Identify what differentiates poor performers from good performers.
The results of the study will help to identify which dimensions of personality and motivation are most relevant when considering sales and service agent performance. This will indicate which areas of the profile are linked to good performance and which areas are potential causes for concern. These results will provide key information that can be utilised in future selection and development activities, ensuring that relevant assessment criteria are being used.
Assessment Centres – Best Practice = Best Results
How do you define the skills required to determine your perfect employee? It is often a blend of hard and soft skills that are necessary to successfully work within a call centre environment. Important personal qualities often include pride in their work and commitment to the job, as well as patience, empathy, resilience, dedication, tenacity and reliability. The necessary skills are often identified as good one-to-one communication, a good telephone manner, problem solving skills and the ability to process and analyse raw data and information. So how do you effectively find these skills at assessment stage?
Once employers have defined their ideal candidate they need to find ways of guaranteeing that their potential new recruits meet their requirements. As the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) indicates there is no one way to go about testing for the right candidate.
“No single technique, irrespective of how it is designed or administrated, is capable of producing perfect selection decisions that predict with certainty which individuals will perform well in a particular role.”
However, the CIPD suggests that a “combination of techniques greatly increases the accuracy of selection decisions.” To find the ideal call centre agent, a mix of psychometric testing and skills assessment should provide a clear portrait of every candidate. Furthermore, the same combination of evaluation methods can be used to identify skills gaps and training needs in existing employees and help them to do a better job.
Final Points to Consider
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Ensure Assessment Centres are held frequently– many candidates will drop out of the process if there is a delay on timescales. Often it is easier to set up smaller and more frequent events than larger periodic ones. The market is far too transient to expect candidates to wait.
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Over-book events – candidates will ALWAYS drop out and often not turn up at all, so over-book the number of candidates invited to events to ensure you are not left with only a minimum number of attendees.
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Ensure Assessment Events are held on site – where possible hold assessment events on-site, this will give candidates a good opportunity to visit the site and get a feel for the environment. It is also the most cost effective location!
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Offer Quickly – if possible make offers to candidates on the spot or if not, make sure you are organised enough to make offers quickly. Again speed through the process is paramount!
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Sell the Opportunity – this is as much about them selling themselves to you as vice versa. Grab their interest, have a motivational speaker at the beginning, make sure all staff running the event are professional, approachable and are selling a strong message.
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Plan Effectively – make sure candidates are not left hanging about, keep the pace of the event moving and do everything you can to ensure that candidates enjoy the experience and whether they are successful or not, they come away with a strong message.
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Use Employees to run Events – where possible utilise company employees to run events, not only is it more cost effective, but they will always give a better and more knowledgeable account of the opportunity and the business.
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Consider the use of On-Line Assessment – although it is paramount that you meet and interview candidates face to face, there are now many excellent tools for assessing skills on-line which are hugely cost & time effective.