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Eliminate 'gut decisions' in Hiring

by Dave Stanley, President, Stanley Staffing - May 26, 2015

Eliminate “gut decisions” in hiring
by Dave Stanley, President, Stanley Staffing

Does your selection process include anything other than one or two interviews and a background screen? Does your firm conduct skill testing? If so is it a typing test and a PC familiarity test? This is common today, but it should not be!

A common interview process for call center agent positions includes a phone screen, a face to face interview, a couple of administrative skill tests, employment verification (not reference check), and a background screen. What’s wrong with that you may ask?

Well for starters the only science in your hiring equation is the quality of your interviewers’ interview. If you have an overworked HR recruiter or CC Team Leader what is the quality of your interview? If your recruiter is new, inexperienced at interviewing, or only believes in “tough” first interviews … what is the quality of that interview?

But assuming your recruiter is not rushing and the quality of the interview is awesome, then why wouldn’t you use more data in assisting with the hiring decision? Time, effort, or money? There are effective ways that are extremely easy while being time and budget friendly which can assist you in making your hiring decisions.

From my experience most companies only use two of the 5 assessment categories when assessing candidates for the job. The Kenexa “Assessment Hierarchy” is as follows:

Job Fit

Culture Fit

Behavioral Fit

Skills Fit

Personality Fit

Kenexa says the above hierarchy contains the five categories that a company should be assessing before making a hire. Here’s how it works:

First, we need to verify that the candidate PREFERS our job. The candidate off the street sometimes wants ANY job. We need to find out if he prefers our job.

Second, we need to find out if the candidate PREFERS our culture. If you have a hands-on culture, hands off people will not prefer it.

Third, we need to know if the candidate has the behaviors found in the top performers or have the genetic composition of the successful people in the position.

Fourth, we need to verify the candidate has the knowledge and skills necessary to do the job.

Fifth, we would like to know the personality traits of the candidate and if they translate to the job.

You can see that if your firm is only interviewing and testing skills that you are only addressing one to two categories. Also have you heard managers say that the personality of the person is very important? Really? We understand that personality is important but I would ask you this:

If you had a candidate that wants and prefers your job type, wants and prefers your culture, has the genetic composition/behaviors that mirrors your top performers, and has the necessary skills and knowledge to do the job … then would you really be concerned whether or not this candidate is outspoken or quiet? That would be risky.

The good news is that it is fairly simple to add “science” to your hiring process. To get started you should analyze the ways in which you evaluate candidates in each of the five categories of Assessments.

Job Fit and Culture Fit: Today most companies rely on the phone and face to face interviews. Interviewing may address Job Fit and Culture Fit if done effectively. One of the best ways to evaluate both Job Fit and Culture Fit outside of interviewing is to have your candidate sit with an Agent and observe the job in action for 45-60 minutes. This gives the candidate a good sampling of job duties and pace of the position, along with a sneak peak at the culture of the job. Debriefing afterward is the key to see if their interest was increased or decreased as a result. One issue may arise if your client’s confidentiality prohibits non-employees from listening in on calls. Providing it does not then you are in business. To the best of my knowledge there is not an “off-the-shelf” assessment for Job Fit and Culture Fit yet, but Kenexa will be rolling them out in Q2 and Q4 this year! Therefore, it is imperative to effectively interview and debrief candidates when assessing the Job Fit and Culture Fit.


Behavioral Fit
: How do you evaluate the Behavioral Fit? Find a good assessment or several. Validity and effectiveness is the key to any assessment. We use a Top Performers Behaviors assessment that has been spot on. Over 4,000 call center Agents across many outbound/inbound call center companies took the behavioral assessment. The participating companies agreed to reveal who their top performers were. After all the data was analyzed, there were seven key behaviors that the top performers all had uniquely-to-them that the middle/bottom performers did not have. Those Super 7 behaviors are now analyzed and scored in the assessment. Candidates that score in the 70th percentile are strongly recommended. Candidates that score under the 30th percentile are not recommended. The assessment also provides to the interviewer “best-in-class” follow-up questions for the interviewer to use to “drill down” deeper in red flag areas. There are several other effective behavioral tests that can measure the likely of a candidate to do well with Teamwork, Sales, Retention, Engagement, Safety, and Customer Service. Another assessment is the Counter Productivity Indicator which will measure the likelihood the candidate will be disruptive, rude, steal, etc.


Knowledge Fit:
Typically companies give a typing test and a MS Office type test. But there is so much more to evaluate. Have you had your candidates take simulation tests? Candidates can put on headsets and take calls from 10 unique simulation tests that best mirror the duties of the call center job we are recruiting for. There are also effective bi-lingual tests that verify not only written and verbal proficiency, but also the candidates ability to not let their accent affect the quality of their English. There are also effective skill tests for Etiquette and Professionalism.


Personality Trait Fit: There are two ways to use the results from a Personality Assessment. First, without previously benchmarking the traits of your top performers you can see the percentile that your candidate has scored in each personality trait. If they are under 10% for Ambition, Assertiveness, and Competitiveness you can certainly bet they would not be a good fit for any sales type position. Conversely if they score highly in Conformity, Attention to detail, and Dependability they may be a better fit for an administrative position. However if you have benchmarked the personality traits of your Top Performers, then those personality traits unique to them may help to identify “Performance Indicators” useful in identifying future top performers.


To have your firm benefit from assessments for each category of Fit, you have a couple of options. One- your firm can do the research, select a company, pay for the services by the test, and start using. You can choose the more affordable “off-the-shelf” assessments or choose the customized version which is usually a five digit investment. Two- if you partner with a staffing firm that uses assessments you can get them generally for free. We use Kenexa for most all of our assessments and are not allowed to resell them. Therefore all the tests we offer our clients come without a charge. That is common in staffing so you should check with your staffing partner and inquire about their ability to provide assessments to you.

Once you can embrace the “Assessment Hierarchy” it gives you an objective and exciting platform in which to evaluate candidates. I encourage your firm to identify the key similarities that your top performers have and your longer retained employees have. Those similarities-INDICATORS for performance and retention are the key components that will show you non-emotional, non-gut decision information. And the beauty is that they help predict the future!

Dave Stanley
President
Stanley Staffing
5400 Transportation Boulevard
Suite 12, Garfield Heights, OH
44125
440-887-8367

 
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