Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Assess Agent Skills Before the Hire

Assess Agent Skills Before the Hire
One's ability to perform a job is not the same as his interest in doing so. The solution? Test for motivation as well as aptitude.
Whether you're hiring 300 new agents in a short time or one new agent every year, you want to find agents that are going to perform their jobs well and stay for as long as you need them. How can you know if the agent with a long job history isn't just going to leave your center in three months? How can you tell whether or not the candidate who looks great on paper and sounds wonderful on the phone will be happy and productive at your center? There's more to selecting qualified agents than just interviews: pre-hire assessments like testing and call center simulations have become essential tools for hiring departments. We spoke with some of the firms that provide these products and services to learn more about what call centers should be looking for in their applicants.
"The time and resources saved through the use of pre-hire assessments are substantial," said Berta Banks, president of the Toronto-based call center hiring and workforce consulting firm Banks & Dean. "And before you spend any time, energy, on a potential candidate, you can make a very strong determination on that individual's propensity to succeed in the call center. It's the difference between spending time and investing time."
Don't be fooled into thinking these tools can enable you to find an army of ready-to-work agents, though; pre-hire assessments are not a substitute for your training programs. Jeff Furst, president of FurstPerson, says it's important not to overlook inexperienced agents: "You want to be as inclusive as possible with the number of candidates you talk to. ... Just because they've worked in a call center before, doesn't mean they have the same approach to first-call resolution or the same ability to do the call that you're looking for. And it could be that someone who has never been in a call center exhibits the right competencies around those abilities and behaviors to be very successful."
Anthony Adorno, vice president of operations for the DeGarmo Group has a similar take. "The goal, of course, should be to find the best qualified people that you can, but the expectation should be that your training is going to be very important," Adorno told us.
You might be surprised at who makes a good employee. "Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance," Google's vice president for people operations Laszlo Bock told the New York Times recently. The Internet giant Google just found out, through company-wide surveys and subsequent pre-hire testing, that the best engineers weren't necessarily the ones with the best grades and the most education.
And Joe LaTorre, director of product design and consulting, Employment Technologies Corporation reminds us that "job-hoppers" may not be unmotivated people: "I know some people hang their hat on looking at past work history to try to determine motivation. Is this a person that is a perpetual job-hopper? And if that's the case, they may draw the conclusion that, well, they're not a very motivated individual. But that can be deceiving because there are many reasons why people change jobs."
So what do call centers need to assess in potential employees? Everyone we talked to about testing cited the two main criteria: can the applicant do the job and will the applicant do the job. Malcolm McCulloch, LIMRA International: "You can have a person who has those abilities or skills, but their motivation, their attitudes are such that they don't really do it, and so it's making sure that folks have the motivation to use their abilities, and this might be drive, achievement orientation, things like that -- conscientiousness, reliability, dependability."
Finally, many of the pre-hire assessment firms we spoke to are testing for fit; specifically, whether or not a potential employee will fit into a particular work environment or culture.
Skills: Call Center Simulations
Call center simulations are good for more than just assessing basic skills. Joe LaTorre of Employment Technologies Corporation, a company that specializes in such simulations, says they're good for the applicant, too: "I believe one of the greatest advantages of the simulation is it gives the applicant the opportunity to experience what the position is like, so it builds more realistic expectations about what it's like to do that job. And it gives them a chance to self-select out if they don't feel that that type of work is suited for them, and in addition to that, it gives you a very good measure of whether or not they have the baseline skills in order to be trained and be successful on the job."
It's a good way to control the flow of less-interested candidates before they reach the interview stage; as Jamie McIntosh, general manager of Contact Center Solutions/Kaplan pointed out, "Sometimes the applicant knows better than the hiring specialist that he or she is not the right fit after sampling the job."
A typical call center simulation will allow an applicant to field a few calls from a computer workstation. A good simulation will explain everything to the user on-screen, taking them through data entry, looking up information and handling callers in a variety of emotional states. The simulation will measure keyboarding skills, but also the candidate's ability to multi-task. Most simulations will take less than an hour to complete.
DeGarmo Group's Anthony Adorno warns against relying too heavily on the simulation: "Yes, simulations can be very effective for providing people with some exposure to what the job is likely to be like, but not enough so that the applicant is going to say, 'hey, this isn't what I want to do,' and 'in taking this simulation I've realized that this job isn't for me.' That's not going to happen a lot. Most applicants are really motivated to get a job, or else they wouldn't be applying, so they're going to do the best job they possibly can on the simulation. But that's going to say nothing of their actual interest in performing the work."
Banks & Dean president Berta Banks is wary of simulations. They're too artificial for her taste, and she's concerned that good candidates get left behind because they do poorly in simulations. "I think it provides a good representation of the job itself, but it does not measure the intangibles of being in a call center. How can sitting in a machine have anything to do with you living in a call center with people all around you?" she told us. She compared the situation to airplane pilot simulations: "When you think about pilots -- they're put into simulations -- they're never put into until they're trained. Why would I want you to fail? I don't want you failing, in fact, I want you successful. So, I do not believe simulations should be used to predict agent success and fit. I think they can be part of it to learn more about the motivation -- that's okay with me. But simulation places individuals in an extremely uncomfortable and unfamiliar surrounding."
Even so, most of the vendors we spoke to agreed that if a call center picked one tool, a simulation would be an excellent choice. Candidates who do well on simulations tend to have lower average handle times on the job, Jeff Furst told us. But while he admits simulations are a favorite of his, he cautions that it's important to understand their limitations: "The challenge you have with a simulation is that you don't necessarily get into a lot of the behavioral components specifically around turnover." He adds that while it may show some ability to think on one's feet, it won't measure an applicant's attitude toward problem solving. This is why it's important to measure an applicant's motivation.
Motivation
In the call center industry, which is haunted by the specter of high turnover, it's important to find people who will succeed, people who come to the job motivated. Anthony Adorno summarized every hiring manager's problem well: "One's ability to perform a job is not the same as their interest in doing so. People can be trained to type faster. They can be trained to navigate a Windows environment more efficiently. They can be trained to reduce their talk time. But they can't be trained to enjoy what they do, more. They can't be trained to like their job." So what can you do? Test for motivation.
Jon Haber, senior vice president of First Advantage Assessment Solutions explained it this way: "Personality traits like motivation are best measured using valid, behavioral surveys, particularly those designed for specific business settings, such as a call center. Motivation, for example, is really a composite of traits such as reliability and trustworthiness. The ability to predict absenteeism, which relates to motivation, can also be measured by determining whether a candidate has an externally or internally driven 'locus of control' (that is, whether they believe what happens to them depends more on their own decisions or external forces)."
While no test can predict the future, this is one area where testing science is mature. Still, motivation is an elusive thing to have to measure. "It's very elusive in the selection process," Joe LaTorre agreed, "because a lot of what is going to contribute to that motivation is, what's it like once they get on job? Do they have a good supervisor that's going to supportive and rewarding? Is the pay structure and the compensation plan designed in a way that motivates the right type of behavior? What are the working conditions? Is it a nice place to show up and go to work? Those factors are more important than anything you can probably learn in the hiring process."
Fit
Once you've determined that an applicant can do the job, and will do the job, it's a good idea to find out if they'll fit into your business culture. Don't under-estimate the power of a work environment and a call center's unique culture to make or break an agent's performance. Obviously, a methodical nurturing type will not thrive in a fast-paced sales center, but there's more to it than that.
This is something that your call center will have to work on with the assessment or consulting firm. But don't leave it to your C-level staff. LIMRA International's Malcolm McCulloch: "We recommend the I-level manager, not the CEO, describe, or what we call 'set the profile,' and it's really just these little descriptors of work. Things like ... how analytical is your work culture? How goal-oriented? How predictable is it?"
Jeff Furst advises making a careful inventory of your call center jobs. "From an assessment standpoint, you first have to understand what the job is," said Furst. "So do some kind of job analysis and job profiling to understand what are those job competencies that create success in a call center environment."
Once you've established some descriptors for your center and its culture, you can determine whether an applicant will thrive or fail.
McCulloch points out how important it is to find an agent who will stick around when a labor market is full of call centers that have to outbid each other in pay scales. "The better the fit, the greater the job satisfaction, and the greater the organizational commitment and retention. So instead of trying to out-pay the people down the road, where all this experienced talent pool is, just try to find people who fit."
New Channels
We asked the experts if they had any tools for assessing new skills for multi-channel contact centers, and most did, but these skills haven't gained as much importance as a lot of us may have guessed.
"We don't see a huge need for it in our client base," Jeff Furst told us. He thinks call centers haven't figured out the best way to use these channels productively yet. "First call resolution is down with these channels -- it just drives more calls to the center."
Jon Haber of First Advantage sees some growth. "Call centers are making more use of electronic communication, especially in areas such as direct sales and tech support. While the ability to use tools such as email and chat is widespread, especially with younger 'wired' workers, the ability to write concise, coherent, professional messages with relevant subject lines is far less common. Assessments on these new communication techniques need to take into account subjects like 'Netiquette' and 'Information Literacy,' areas that get to the heart of not just the technology, but also the content of electronic communications."
LIMRA's Malcolm McCulloch told us that electronic skills will be more than just basic grammar and writing. "Chat and email skills will be necessary, and measuring those will be important. In fact, I'll take it one step further; I think the reps are going to have to be good, not just at reading, but analytical reading."
What Is A Pre-Employment Test and Why Care?
By Malcolm C. McCulloch, Ph.D., LIMRA International
The goal of pre-employment testing is to provide helpful information for agent hiring decisions. In many countries these tests must meet legal standards to show both effectiveness for organizations and fairness to applicants. But on a more pragmatic and business perspective, testing should consistently identify superstar talent from poor talent. Otherwise, it is a waste of time and money.
The $64,000 question: what is a "pre-employment test?"
Most of us think of pre-employment tests as similar to school tests or simulation tests such as a keyboard test. But did you know that interviews and application forms are pre-employment tests, too? Even informal assessments, such as asking applicants to role play handling a rude customer, are pre-employment tests. All tests must meet quality metrics expected of pre-employment tests. Unfortunately, call centers sometimes overlook this point.
The legal definition of a test provides good logic on the key feature of a test used in a hiring decision. In the United States, courts and government agencies define a "hiring test" as any activity used to rank applicants so that one individual becomes more "eligible" or "qualified" than others for employment.
This means that a lot of pre-employment activities that don't "look or smell" like tests are, nonetheless, hiring tests. Managers may protest, "Interviews aren't tests! My role play isn't a test!" But the interview or role play is a test if it is used to evaluate applicants so that some are (1) ranked or (2) moved ahead in the hiring sequence while others are not.
Here is the big implication: If you use a test, it should meet quality metrics of reliability, validity, and fairness. It is not only a legal issue; it is also a business issue. These metrics help show that the test effectively and fairly identifies qualified individuals from unqualified. The truth is many hiring tests -- mostly unrecognized -- are assumed to be useful in agent hiring but there is no evidence of benefit. Too often, they have no value to a call center and you are wasting time and resources.
If you choose to use a formal or informal test, it should include information on the quality metrics. It only makes sense for successful agent hiring.

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