Does your current hiring approach predict the candidates who will thrive in the contact center role?
I often ask leaders of award-winning contact centers what they think is the key strength of their operation. They almost always point to their people. Many also stress that the “secret sauce” is hiring the right type of service staff—those who are enthusiastic, positive and who demonstrate passion for helping customers. These companies typically adhere to a rigorous hiring process and the managers never settle for less than excellent.
Unfortunately, in an industry where high turnover rates are considered a fact of life, many more contact centers cave to internal pressures. The need to hire quickly and fill seats outweighs the consequences of bringing on board a bad hire—leading to a perpetual cycle of disengagement and attrition.
“The longer the position has been open and the more positions you have to fill, the more you’re willing to lower your standards,” says Mark Murphy, founder of leadership training and research firm Leadership IQ, and author of Hiring for Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach to Recruiting Star Performers with Both Tremendous Skills and Superb Attitude. “Too many managers go into interviews looking for reasons to hire, as opposed to looking for reasons not to hire.”
A three-year study by Leadership IQ, found that 46% of new-hires fail within the first 18 months, largely due to a lack of interpersonal skills. The research, based on 5,247 interviews with hiring managers from 312 organizations, revealed that:
- 26% of new-hires fail because they can’t accept feedback;
- 23% because they’re unable to understand and manage emotions;
- 17% because they lack the necessary motivation to excel; and
- 15% have the wrong temperament for the job.
“We discovered that most job interviews focused on technical skills rather than a candidate’s coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament,” Murphy says. “It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but they’re not a predictor of a new-hire’s success or failure.”
Although attitudinal interviews are more effective at assessing future success, Murphy says that managers often rush through this part of the process. If they feel like they’ve clicked with a candidate after a couple of questions, they often end up skipping the rest of the questions. In fact, the majority (82%) of hiring managers in the study reported, in hindsight, that they had overlooked the clues that a candidate probably wouldn’t work out because they were pressed for time, were tired of the process or believed that training could transform the wrong candidates into high-performing employees.
How can you prevent hiring failures? Murphy advises going into the interview with a crystal-clear plan of which questions you’re going to ask and in which order. Be prepared: Know what good and bad responses to those questions sound like, and what actions you’ll take if you get a bad answer.
For instance, if your interview plan includes five key questions, even if a candidate provides outstanding responses to the first three, don’t stop there—always ask the final two questions. “If the candidate gives a poor response on any of the questions, no matter how much you like the person or how much you feel that you’ve already clicked, let that poor response stand and give the interview low marks,” he stresses, adding that: “It takes discipline to be willing to say, ‘I am perfectly OK with not hiring somebody.’”
Evaluate Candidates for Coachability
Rapidly evolving technology and expanding product lines have contributed to an environment in which many frontline agents are finding it increasingly difficult to keep pace with constantly changing tools, processes and expectations. A new-hire’s “coachability” can be a key factor in whether or not he or she can grow and thrive with those changes. Murphy defines coachability as being able to take feedback, assimilate that feedback, and then anticipate and seek out feedback.
How do you identify that attribute during a job interview? Someone who is coachable is able to separate their ego from the issue, he says, even if the message is delivered by someone who is not skilled at providing effective feedback. The coachable employee “will find the nugget and then try to implement it. They also have a decent sense of what the feedback will be without having to receive the feedback. They generally know how they’ve performed.”
Murphy recommends asking candidates to describe what their former boss would say was one of their weaknesses. “You’ll get a lot of candidates who will respond, ‘They didn’t give me a lot of feedback. You would have to ask them.’ Or, ‘They never told me what my weaknesses are.’ That’s a red flag because the person is basically saying, ‘I’m not anticipating what my boss’s feedback would be.’”
Another question that will highlight whether a candidate is coachable: What is something you could have done different or have done better to improve your work performance? “This question will tell you whether the candidate has something top of mind and whether they’ve actually thought about their work performance, which is a key part of coachability,” Murphy explains.
Can someone who knows how to excel at interviews feign coachability? Not really. The robustness of the response will separate the genuinely coachable candidates from those trying to fake their way through the interview. “The people who have really given it thought will give you in-depth answers. They’re going to talk for several minutes, they will provide specifics and they will tell you what they’ve changed as a result,” he says. And, “ideally, they would even be able to provide you with the outcome.”
The Problem with Traditional Personality Testing
Hiring candidates who are well-suited to the contact center job and work environment has been a long-time challenge for management. Contact centers have added layers to the hiring process, bringing potential candidates into the center for peer panel interviews and job previews to help determine whether they’re a good fit. But the disconnect often happens early on.
During the prehire phase, many organizations rely on traditional personality assessments to determine whether an individual would be a good fit for the center. But while these types of assessments can provide detailed psychological information about candidates, that information is typically hard to apply to the specific role or job that the person will be doing.
“Personality assessments are good for identifying people who work well with others,” says Kevin Hegebarth, VP of Marketing and Product Management at HireIQ Solutions. “One could argue that that’s an admirable trait for a call center agent but, the fact is, to do their jobs well, agents don’t necessarily have to rely on their co-workers. Instead, they have to create a rapport with the customer. They have to be able to serve the customer well.”
Another traditional hiring tool, cognitive intelligence assessments are often used to evaluate a potential agent’s problem-solving ability and reasoning, among other things. But are they effective? “Behavioral cognitive intelligence assessments were really developed with mid-level management in mind—somebody whose day-to-day job is supervising others in a context other than a contact center experience,” Hegebarth points out. “Over the years, organizational behavior theorists have come to the conclusion that customer service workers need to possess a different type of skill and a different type of orientation—and the style and construct of traditional assessments are incongruent with the type of job that the call center agent does.”
The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Agent Performance
In recent years, emotional intelligence (EQ) has emerged as a key indicator of performance in the workplace. EQ—a term made popular by Dan Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence (1995) and Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (2005)—is defined as the ability to recognize, understand and manage one’s own emotions, and the emotions of others.
“There is a great deal of academic and organizational research to back up the notion that people who display positive emotions are more engaged and tend to perform better,” Hegebarth says. Positive emotions doesn’t necessarily mean happy-sounding people, he points out, but people who sound energetic and who have a pleasant tone in their voice.
In the workplace, agents with similar emotional characteristics can feed off each other, resulting in higher performance. Hegebarth refers to this as the “birds of a feature” phenomenon: “If you have a group of positive emotion people together on a contact center team, even though they’re not reliant on each other to do their job, it has an effect of osmosis—emotions are contagious in a team environment.” (To read more about the research, see “Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?” Perspectives, Academy of Management, Sigal G. Barsade and Donald E. Gibson, February 1, 2007.)
Conversely, those who exhibit negative emotions (think subdued, rather than sad or mad) tend to produce lower customer satisfaction scores and are prime candidates for early attrition. Can the positives counteract the negatives? “If you have a heterogeneous group of negative and positive emotion people, there will be friction within the group, and the group will not perform as well,” he says.
How to Assess EQ
Interviews to assess a candidate’s emotional intelligence tend to focus on behavioral questions that fall into five categories: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation and social skills. For example:
- How would your peers describe you?
- (self-awareness)
- How do you handle stressful situations?
- (self-regulation)
- Describe a time when you had to deliver bad news to a customer. (empathy)
- Describe a time you went above and beyond to help a customer. (motivation)
- Describe a difficult issue you had to deal with. (social skills)
There are obvious red flags to watch for in the way that a candidate responds, such as defensiveness, avoiding or deflecting issues, lack of accountability or ownership, and candidates who portray themselves as victims of their company, supervisor or co-workers. But the problem for contact center managers is that deciding how well candidates respond to EQ questions generally comes down to gut instinct.
Enter predictive analytics.
Predictive hiring analytics makes it easier to forecast the right fit by identifying key character traits and behaviors demonstrated by job candidates and comparing them against the contact center’s top performers.
How does it work? “One well-established method of predicting a candidate’s performance potential is to analyze emotions that are exhibited by the candidate during the telephone-screening phase of the recruitment process,” says Hegebarth. An advanced voice analysis software application (HireIQ’s Audiolytics™) can then “mine the recorded, natural-language interviews for these emotional characteristics and use them, in addition to other features of the recorded audio, to predict a job applicant’s potential to be a high-performing, long-tenured employee.”
One advantage of this approach is that candidates don’t know that they’re being assessed. Therefore, the candidates are able to respond naturally to an automated Q&A test administered via IVR, as opposed to providing the types of answers that they think the hiring manager is looking for in a one-on-one interview.
Another benefit of predictive analytics is that, unlike traditional assessments that compare candidates against a model that is created and validated once, “it’s a continuously validating process, and not based on a single-point-in-time exercise,” Hegebarth says. “Outcome data that is relevant to your operation, such as first-call resolution, customer satisfaction, etc., is regularly collected and the models are adjusted continuously so that you can continually identify people who are likely to satisfy and produce that level of business outcome.”
Understand Your Top Performers
A well-developed agent profile will allow you to understand what makes an ideal candidate before you begin the hiring process.
It’s important to have a keen awareness of what you’re looking for, says Hegebarth. “This is where predictive analytics really comes into play,” he says. “Know which types of assessments, interview questions, behaviors, elements on a resume, etc., are actually forward-looking indicators of good performance.”
For instance, are your job listings and descriptions current and do they highlight the relevant job qualifications? “Oftentimes, I’ll see a job listing that states, ‘Must have a bachelor’s degree’ or ‘Must have an associate’s degree,’” he says. “Is that really essential to this type of job? Or are there other attributes that will be better forward-looking indicators of first-call resolution or Csat? Test for the things that are indicative of good performance in those areas. They’re not always obvious, so create an assessment methodology to help uncover those types of indicators.”
Once you have identified the characteristics that make your top performers excel at their job, it’s important to clearly define what those are so that everyone involved in the hiring process is working from the same page, advises Murphy. For instance, many hiring managers look for candidates with the right “attitude.” But what does that really mean?
“Take a look at Southwest Airlines vs. The Ritz-Carlton—both do a great job hiring for attitude, but their attitudes are very different from one another. One is ‘ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.’ The other is ‘fun and sense of humor.’ Those are not the same attitudes,” he explains. “Make sure that you’re all in agreement about what you’re looking for, especially if there are multiple hiring managers involved.”
Murphy adds that it’s also important to understand the attributes that your low performers have in common. “You’ll discover a core set of characteristics that generally predict failure in your organization,” he says. When conducting interviews, make sure that you don’t hire people who have the characteristics of your current low performers. “If you do nothing else than eliminate the bad hires, you would end up, just by definition, doubling your number of high performers, which is a pretty good outcome for not a lot of work,” he adds.
Recommended Reading:
For more about the Leadership IQ research, see “Why New Hires Fail (Emotional Intelligence Vs. Skills).” (http://bit.ly/leadershipIQ-082015).
Recommended Reading:
Research conducted by HireIQ has shown that the notion of emotional maturity, emotional disposition and emotional affect are significant forward-looking indicators of performance in first-call resolution and Csat, as well as agent retention. For further reading, see “Emotional Assessments: A Disruptive Innovation in Candidate Selection,” by Kevin Hegebarth; (http://bit.ly/hireIQ-PDF082015).
Editor’s note:
Scheduling telephone interviews can be a challenge for both hiring managers and job candidates. Virtual interviewing offers an ideal solution. It is typically conducted in two parts: a text-response Q&A on the web, followed by a an automated voice-response interview. Candidates can take the interviews at their convenience and, likewise, hiring managers can review and evaluate the responses at a later time. For an in-depth look at virtual interviewing, see “Improving Hiring Performance: The Business Case for Virtual Interviewing,” (http://bit.ly/hireiq-PDF082015a).