[In this multi-part series, FurstPerson will examine the award-winning results a telecommunications customer achieved through the use of FurstPerson’s hiring assessment tools. The series will examine specific obstacles, goals, statistics, and results that FurstPerson and the customer witnessed from the use of these assessments.]
Trying to gauge how an employee will perform in a call center is a demanding task, especially during the hiring process. When a candidate comes in all that’s known about them is what’s printed on their resume, and it’s the job of the talent acquisition team to fill in the gaps. A powerful tool to achieve this is hiring assessments. Hiring assessments can be designed to target any number of personality traits, job skills, or valuable qualities that are essential to the candidate’s success in the position he or she is applying to. Amongst the many things that hiring assessments can target, one of the most crucial is how a candidate would perform as an employee.
FurstPerson and a telecommunications company recently worked to design an assessment that would target employee performance. The telecommunications company desired that new contact center employees would be able to perform well with first call resolution (FCR), a challenging area for new hires.
In order to improve the FCR performance of new hires, the company and FurstPerson had to work to establish what jobs-related skills and personality traits were important to measure during the hiring assessment process. By understanding what’s important to the position, not only could the company target those areas, they could also better understand areas that aren’t as important to success in the contact center, and therefore spend less time focusing on them during the hiring process. FurstPerson and the company found that skills such as the ability to work with numbers, communicate effectively, multi-task accurately, and have a service-oriented mindset were some of the critical areas for FCR performance in new hires. Thus, FurstPerson and the company designed a hiring assessment tool that would measure these skills and provide qualitative data about each candidate to the talent acquisition teams.
The initial assessments were launched, and the company found that 72% of new hires were achieving FCR results; largely due to the assessments finding candidates that could yield these numbers during the hiring process. However, in order to continue improving upon FCR results with new hires, FurstPerson and the company kept analyzing information and using data from both candidate and employee performance to improve the assessments. By doing this, FurstPerson and the company were able to continually improve upon the hiring assessment process and drive further success. The result was that the company saw an improvement in FCR efforts from new hires, improving from 72% with the initial assessment to 99% with the latest revisions.
Driving results through the use of hiring assessments is not a one-time solution; it’s a continued effort that requires an understanding of the position, what it takes to succeed in that position, and the data to back up that reasoning. Through this demonstrated process, FurstPerson and the company were able to see extraordinary results with the company’s FCR performance in new hires, increasing to 99%.
To learn more about this award winning study be sure to check out our press release, continue checking the blog every other day for new posts, or contact us today. For information on talent acquisition, download the talent acquisition commandments e-book below: