Chicago , IL - April 30, 2006 - It's an industry fact that 60 to 70 percent of expenses for call center operations are associated directly with labor. Furthermore, the recruitment and retention of quality agents is the number one challenge facing call centers employers. It's no surprise then that the best call centers are those that hire the most qualified agents, avoid turnover and improve their employees' performances by staffing the work environment with other highly qualified employees.

Great call center agents can not only do a good job for you, but also serve as role models for others and help train them to perform better. Fortunately, hiring the best doesn't have to be hit or miss. With careful planning, your call center can be staffed with the finest agent personnel available. Following are a few tips on improving agent selection and performance:

Develop a hiring plan. Your plan doesn't have to be electronic or web-based, but it does need to be documented so you can track and measure results and modify your processes as needed.

Source applicants carefully. Hiring talent requires focusing only on sources proven to have talented applicants. PeopleScout uses a proven strategy supported by software to enable us to make fact-based decisions on how and where to place recruitment ads. The software tracks media responses and allows the company to track ads to hire and retention. Quality, not just quantity of responses, should be evaluated.

Screen candidates in person and over the phone. Effective screening and selection tools can reduce turnover by more than 10 percent. These tools need to assess both the skill and the will to do the job. Skill-based assessment tools can evaluate customer service orientation while a live screening process can evaluate motivational fit by providing a realist job preview. PeopleScout's process includes preliminary web-based screening, a voice interview to evaluate "soft skills" and behavioral assessments.

Screen for both communication and keyboarding skills. A voice interview will assess communication skills, which is paramount for a call center position, as most call center jobs are phone jobs. Your company needs to determine how a potential hire presents him or herself over the phone and how they would react in certain situations -- for example a call from an angry customer. Keyboarding skills are also an important part of the position -- the potential employee needs to be able to access records, remember information and key in a phone or credit card numbers, if required.

Have an objective, consistent interview process. Be as objective and consistent as possible during the interview process to reduce or eliminate variables -- and stay within equal opportunity hiring guidelines. PeopleScout uses scripts and software to develop a quantitative-based scoring mechanism to determine applicants' presentation skills, confidence and other important "soft skills" necessary to be a good call center employee. In addition, a consistent process can be replicated, allowing more employees to interview potential candidates. At PeopleScout there isn't just one person responsible for hiring and processing all candidates -- in fact, existing call center employees are often a part of the process.

Study your best performers. PeopleScout has interviewed and studied the best existing call center employees to ascertain how they perform their jobs and what the characteristics are for an ideal hire, enabling us to base our hiring method on proven results. In general every call center is different and every company is different, so you need to develop your ideal hire based on your company's unique culture.

Experience trumps education. One challenge of a call center job is its repetitive nature -- a person is talking to people all day, perhaps in a cubicle or other similar environment. The best way to determine if someone will be happy in a call center environment is to know they have held the job before. It's a unique job and not every person is cut out for it -- which is why experience is more important than education in determining job happiness and success.

Hire an extrovert. The employee needs to be someone who enjoys talking to people.

Be realistic about the job. PeopleScout explains the good, the bad and the ugly to candidates about our call center jobs. We don't want applicants coming in with rose-colored glasses and quitting days later out of frustration. Very qualified candidates are allowed to come into our call center and shadow employees to see what a typical workday is like so they will know what the job entails and what is expected of them.

Hire quickly. Studies show that an hourly worker is on the market for no more than five days, so if you are hiring hourly employees your process needs to be shorter than that time window. In addition, a typical candidate might have more than one job opportunity. By having a quick but efficient hiring process in place, your company will gain the best employees and eliminate it from being the second choice. It also keeps your costs down -- because you aren't engaged in "sweetening the pot" to encourage potential candidates to work for your company versus another offer.

Know the job. The rule of thumb across industries is that your interviewer should be someone who has done the job and knows what it entails and who would be a good employee. The best training for being a recruiter is utilizing an individual that understands the nature of the job and was a good agent performer.

If your company adheres to these general rules, you will greatly enhance your chances of improving your agent selection, performance and retention.

Denise Foy is president of PeopleScout, a Chicago-based candidate-processing firm that specializes in high-volume recruitment for major companies in the transportation, retail, telecommunications and finance industries among others. She can be reached at: www.peoplescout.com, or by calling: 800-966-4803

About PeopleScout
PeopleScout is a division of SeatonCorp, a best-in-class staffing and recruiting company recently named by Crain's Chicago Business as one of Chicago's largest privately held companies. PeopleScout is a leading provider of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) services aimed at helping companies with their exempt and non-exempt hiring needs. The firm's suite of services includes RPO, employment branding, on-boarding, and employee retention. Annually, PeopleScout facilitates over 184,000 hires via partial-cycle RPO engagements and end-to-end RPO engagements. Industries served include airline, financial services, telecommunications, retail, utilities, insurance, pharmaceutical, and transportation.

PeopleScout's clients include some of the more recognizable names in the Fortune 500 list of companies. PeopleScout has succeeded in being selected for four consecutive years to HRO Today Magazine's Baker's Dozen - the closely watched list of industry - leading RPO providers - as well as being named #1 in large deal capabilities. The firm also has also been recognized as the #1 RPO Provider by The Black Book of Outsourcing on its "2008 Top Ten HRO: Recruitment Process Outsourcing/RPO" list. For more information, please visit us at www.peoplescout.com or call 800-966-4803.

For More Information
Gerry Sullivan
Vice President, Solutions Development
(312) 915-5036
gsullivan@peoplescout.com