Hiring decisions matter now more than ever. When companies are trying to do more with less, successful customer management with fixed or fewer resources will be a key determinant of survival and profitability. Because agent performance directly impacts top and bottom line revenue, quality of hire for these key customer-facing roles becomes even more important. But, while quality matters, the hiring process still needs to be efficient and seem reasonable to candidates and recruiters alike. Can we have it all?

Scientific assessment of candidate competencies and skills helps employers hire call center agents who will perform better and stay longer, whether roles are traditional in-center roles or remote or at-home agent populations. Decades of research clearly show that valid pre-employment assessment tools - including tests, simulations, and interviews - produce better hiring decisions and a clear return on investment (ROI) across virtually every job and job level. Simply put - candidates who score higher on assessments of job-relevant competencies and skills ramp up faster, perform better against key call center metrics, and turnover less than do lower-scoring candidates. Whether servicing, selling, supporting, or collecting, agents who score higher on valid pre-employment assessments perform better on the job.

Beyond predicting job success, well designed assessment programs can also improve the efficiency of hiring processes and can enhance legal defensibility. Smart use of technology integrates assessments into the job application process. For example, online pre-employment tests can be easily integrated with Applicant Tracking Systems through a number of standard protocol (e.g., HR-XML), and "off-the-shelf" integration is even available. Legal defensibility is enhanced through structured objective hiring processes that are linked to documented job requirements. The use of valid assessment procedures to measure job-related competencies and skills is prescribed by federal enforcement agencies such as the EEOC and OFCCP, as well as by multiple professional guidelines related to testing and employment decisions.

The best kind of testimony to the value of remote agent assessments is proof that it works. The following graphics represent the impact to one organization we worked with in the past year, that used assessments to screen their remote agents.

The bottom-line impact from these operational improvements, caused by hiring better remote agents, is very significant. When combined with increased sales and a reduction in turnover, the overall impact s indeed dramatic. Before we delve further into how to achieve results like this for your organization, let’s first better understand the increasingly important job type known as the Remote Agent.

Call center agent roles have changed dramatically over the past few decades along with changes in technology, organizational structures, and so-called off-shoring trends. Particularly important, though, are recent advances in broadband internet connectivity, remote job performance monitoring technology, and an increased need for cutting overhead costs that have led to the emergence of a new type of call center agent. Many call center agents can now work entirely from their home offices without ever stepping foot in a “real” office. These remote agents engage in the same job duties as their onsite counterparts, just in a different environment.

Many organizations are offering their top performing call center agents the opportunity to move their role to their home offices. Other organizations utilize entirely remote agent workforces. For the latter, hiring, interviewing, training, and all subsequent work related activities are often done without ever meeting the candidate or employee face-to-face. Though entry into the role differs, the unique challenges facing all remote call center agents are the same.

Call center agents have virtually no physical interaction with their coworkers. If a remote agent has a question for a coworker while on a call, they would likely use an instant messenger program or locate the information him- or herself. In addition to the tactical disadvantages remote agents face due to lack of face-to-face contact with coworkers, remote agents do not get the daily social interaction and opportunity for camaraderie that in-office agents benefit from. In fact, in many call centers that we have visited and worked with, the in-office camaraderie and socializing is often reported as one of the most positive and rewarding parts of the agents’ job. Many remote agents are required to supply their own computers and related equipment. They are also responsible for the setup, configuration, and maintenance of this equipment, along with a high-speed internet connection that facilitates “soft-phones” and many of the other technologies companies use to manage their remote agents. For many, although the opportunity to work from home seems like a wonderful way to maintain healthy work-life balance, the line between “work life” and “non-work life” can become blurred. All of these challenges are, of course, added to the unique challenges already faced by call center agents, and need to be accounted for in the screening process.

Hiring for call center roles is challenging - even when you have plenty of applicants. Recruiters, hiring Managers, Human Resources Directors, Operations Managers, and anyone else who shares the responsibility for staffing contact centers all want to know:

• Which candidates are ready to perform as agents?
• Who can be trained to become a successful agent?
• Who will stay long enough to provide a return on our recruitment and training investments?
• Who will perform best on key call center metrics like first-call resolution or dollars collected?

Interestingly, experience doesn’t tell the whole story. Effectively identifying high-potential candidates requires a deeper approach than just resume reviews and background checks. While these processes may be effective at raising red flags or surfacing gross mismatches between candidates and jobs, they do little to describe (or quantify) candidates’ competencies and skill levels in a meaningful and consistent way. Organizations that go beyond experience and actually assess candidates’ skills and competencies in the hiring processes have seen:

• 107% more sales conversions among outbound agents
• 31% reduction in turnover among inbound contact center agents
• 11% reduction in average handle time among remote agents
• 68% higher customer satisfaction ratings among remote agents

As you can imagine, these types of metrics have a significant impact to the bottom-line. With increasing competitive pressures and resource constraints, organizations are relying more on evidence-based management to improve their success across a variety of talent management functions. In talent acquisition, employers are looking for science-based tools that enable better hiring decisions, predict performance, and improve business outcomes. Fortunately, there has been tremendous progress in behavioral and organizational sciences over the past 100 years or so. Fields such as Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Psychometrics specialize in applying data-driven scientific methods to real-world challenges, such as: what characteristics to evaluate in candidates during the hiring process and how best to measure those competencies and skills. A century of scientific progress has produced well-refined best practices for designing and implementing assessments that can help employers make better hiring decisions.

Hiring decisions do not happen in a vacuum, though. There is a competitive market for talent which means that efficiency in the hiring process matters, too. Employers need tools that reliably uncover information about candidate readiness and potential – and they need this information before the candidate either drops out of the process or accepts another offer. Therefore, tools must be easy to use and valued by end-users, and they should keep candidates engaged during the application process.

In short, employers want a candidate evaluation process that predicts who will make a successful call center agent and who will not. The process needs to be straightforward, and perceived as reasonable and useful by both decision-makers and job candidates. The process should be objective and fair, assessing candidates on job-relevant characteristics. A scientific approach to hiring using pre-employment assessment can help meet these goals.

Pre-employment assessment is the systematic evaluation of candidates’ skills and competencies using tools such as internet-based tests and structured interviews. Professionally developed, valid assessment tools have been shown across hundreds of research studies to predict on-the-job performance including key call center metrics such as customer service, retention, call handle time, and dollars sold/collected.

Assessment is available in a variety of forms and formats, ranging from multiple choice computer-based tests with automated scoring to structured behavioral interviews administered by trained interviewers. Assessments are used to measure a wide range of human attributes – everything from personality traits that describe people’s motivations and social competencies, to skills and abilities like computer usage and problem-solving, Assessments can even be designed to assess candidate’s interest in specific job roles, for example through “job fit” tests and simulations that provide realistic job previews of the call center work environment and sample agent job tasks. In most cases, using a combination of assessment types during the hiring process will provide a more comprehensive assessment of candidates than will using just a single type of test (e.g., skills). The more you know about your candidates, the better your decisions and the bigger the business impact from new hires.

For any call center agent, regardless of his or her physical location, a certain set of skills and competencies are required for success. The remote agent, however, requires an additional set of skills and competencies to overcome the challenges unique to remote work. For example, remote agents require more internal motivation than the typical call center agent. They do not have coaches or supervisors looking over their shoulders. Also, it is often the remote agent’s responsibility to make sure they are up to date on company policies and procedures and to seek out training opportunities. Typical call center agents often follow a “script”, but conversations with customers can deviate from the script. In those situations, an agent can quickly get guidance from his or her supervisor or coworkers, but remote agents are usually required to quickly come up with solutions…on their own. Therefore, they often require both better problem solving skills and more comfort with taking risks.

Successful remote agents maintain a workspace separate from their non-work life to ensure that the work space is tailored specifically to work efficiency. Remote agents often require more technical savvy than the typical call center agent because they must handle all short-term technological complications and general maintenance of their work station.

Remote agents must also have certain personality characteristics to be successful. The ability to create a psychological distinction between work and non-work life is important for any job, but it is critical when “life” is happening around you all day long. Studies have shown that simple activities like washing and dressing for work and keeping work activities confined to specific spaces in the home can greatly improve a remote agent’s likelihood of success. The most successful remote agents are also more proactive. They take the time to check on which company policies have been changed and make sure their equipment is working properly rather than waiting for a supervisor to come along and correct them or have their systems fail in the middle of a call. Perhaps the most unique characteristic important for success in a remote agent role is comfort in being both socially isolated and customer focused. A remote agent must possess the technical skills, social skills, empathy, and customer orientation necessary to be successful as a call center agent, but must also be comfortable having his or her only social interactions with coworkers over instant messenger and the phone.

Success is really in the eye of the beholder. A successful hiring process is one that helps organizations achieve their specific hiring and business goals. From the employer’s perspective, the return on investment (ROI) for resources spent on hiring generally fall into three main categories:

• Effectiveness
• Efficiency
• Compliance

Effectiveness ROI is all about the top- and bottom-line revenue impact of having higher performing call center agents. Here’s how it works. Within your candidate pool, some people would be more successful as call center agents based on their readiness to step into the agent role and their potential for long term success on the job. By identifying aspects of readiness and potential during the hiring process, through the use of valid pre-employment assessment tools, organizations make better informed hiring decisions that result in better hires and better call center performance.

Efficiency ROI refers to the cost savings associated with more efficient processes and workflow. For example, the use of assessments early in the recruiting process can result in saved time for the recruiter. By utilizing a valid, predictive screening assessment right after candidates complete application form and basic qualifications/pre-screening questions, recruiters could immediately save 30% of the time spent processing the least qualified candidates (e.g., reviewing resumes) and focus that time instead on attracting and engaging the highest scoring candidates who are more likely to be successful and to be retained.

Compliance refers to both the internal compliance with the intended uses of the assessment program, as well as compliance with relevant laws and guidelines for use of testing in employment decisions. Successful assessment programs rely on correct usage of the tools, and system features like score reports become important. How will score information be used in the hiring decision? In terms of legal risk, many experts would say that good assessment programs actually reduce risks associated with hiring because of the inclusion of standardized, objective tools in the process. Professional best practices and a number of published standards provide strong guidance to employers regarding the processes to follow to create assessment programs that work…and that are more likely to be deemed “legal” in the event of a challenge. Assessments from reputable companies like PreVisor have had great success predicting agent performance in call center roles. And as the popularity of the remote agent role increases, new methods have been developed that can distinguish which individuals are likely to succeed as call center agents and also as remote workers. Many organizations are currently offering successful tenured call center agents the opportunity to work remotely. Their assumption is that successful in-office agents will be similarly successful at home. However, as noted earlier, the remote agent must possess some unique characteristics in order to handle the remote role. It would be prudent for these organizations to use assessments tailored to these unique competencies before sending off their best employees to fail at home. Assessment can be used both to hire remote agents directly, and to identify training needs for agents being considered for remote work.

For organizations that hire applicants directly into remote roles, assessment is critical. The hiring managers may never meet the applicant in person before making a decision, so they are more dependent on assessments than the typical organization. Also, completely remote organizations do not have the opportunity to use any assessments that require proctoring. They must rely on assessments that can be administered online without a company representative present to monitor the process. Finally, the organization must simultaneously assess the potential for success as a call center agent and as a remote worker. Leaving out either side of the equation would result in reduced prediction of important performance outcomes.

Work in the area of predicting remote agent success is very promising. Studies have shown that including a remote work potential assessment to a typical call center agent test battery leads to positive business outcomes and accurate prediction of at-home agent performance. Agents scoring higher on assessments of remote work potential were:

• Rated as better employees by their supervisors,
• Had faster call times, and
• Had higher customer satisfaction ratings.

7. How Assessment Works

8. Using Assessments in Hiring

9. The Bottom Line: Science Works!