Better Hiring through Science: Assess Skills and Competencies that Predict Success, by Ken Lahti, Ph.D.
Increase sales by 24%? Reduce turnover by 60%? Reduce AHT by nearly a minute? These are just some examples of the kind of major impact realized by organizations who used assessments in their hiring processes. In this paper, you will learn how they did it.
Scientific assessment of candidate competencies and skills helps employers hire better call center agents who will stay longer. Decades of research across thousands of organizations clearly shows that valid pre-employment assessment tools, including tests, simulations, and interviews, produce a clear return on investment (ROI) when used in hiring decisions. 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. Well designed assessment programs can also improve hiring process efficiency and provide enhanced legal defensibility through the use of objective tools and professional best practices.
Hiring for call center jobs is challenging. 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 do the job?
• Who will stay in the role long enough to be productive and provide a return on our recruitment and training investments?
• Who will perform best on key call center metrics like first-call resolution or revenue per hour?
Effectively identifying high-potential candidates requires a more sophisticated approach than resume reviews and background checks, because experience doesn’t tell the whole story. Organizations that go beyond experience and assess candidates’ skills and competencies in the hiring processes have seen:
• 24% increase in sales
• 87% improvement in retention
• 42 second decrease in Average Handling Time
Whenever there are more job candidates than positions available, employers need to make hiring decisions. Good hiring decisions result in employees who perform well in their jobs and do not turn over too quickly, whereas bad hiring decisions produce lower performance and reduced business impact.
Thus, rather than leave hiring decisions to luck, employers have sought tools and processes that enable better decisions and that improve business outcomes. Fortunately, there has been tremendous progress over the past 100 years or so in behavioral sciences such as Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Psychometrics. These disciplines utilize data-driven scientific methods to solve real-world challenges, such as how to best evaluate candidates during the hiring process. Download the white paper to read more about the result of over a century of scientific developments is a comprehensive set of tools.