A step-by-step process for improving hiring techniques.
There are three foundational building blocks that need to be optimized to consistently deliver engaging customer experiences over the phone: people, processes and leadership. Our journey will cover each of these focus areas in detail. This article will focus on people; specifically, how we can hire more top performers and how we can ensure that employees meet and/or exceed our expectations?
The U.S. Labor Department estimates that 50% of new-hires are mistakes—meaning that they don’t last longer than six months on the job. Even if your organization has experienced better results, it’s still likely that the other 50%—employees who have been with you for more than six months—only contain a small percentage of high performers. The question then becomes how do we minimize hiring mistakes and hire more top performers?
For starters, it’s critical to understand why new-hires fail. According to Leadership IQ, more than 80% of the reasons are attitudinal. Specific attitudes that determine performance potential include coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament. New-hires fail only 11% of the time due to technical competence. This means that we do an excellent job hiring for technical fit, but a poor job hiring for attitude and cultural fit. Therefore, we need to change how we approach the hiring process.
The following is a step-by-step process to improve your hiring techniques and hire more top performers:
Step 1: Define Your Culture
If you haven’t already done so, identify the desired behaviors critical to your organization’s success. Think about Zappos & Southwest Airlines—two service-oriented organizations well known for their strong corporate cultures. Both of these companies know exactly the types of behaviors that they want (which are typically tied to their core values), and they screen potential hires accordingly. What’s more, they are willing to pass on people with off-the-charts technical skills if they aren’t a cultural fit. Some even say that it’s easier to get accepted into Harvard than to get a job at Zappos!
Step 2: Identify Transferrable Skill Sets
Transferrable skill sets are the foundational skills needed to do deliver outstanding service, so they must be assessed during the interview process. As a call center agent, essential skills should include critical thinking (ability to solve problems), communication (written, verbal and listening), coachability (ability to accept feedback, both positive and negative), the ability to be a team player, and evident passion for helping others.
Step 3: Align Your Internal Team
Create an internal scorecard—an executive summary of the position to be filled—which includes a mission (core expectations), deliverables, transferable skill sets and cultural behaviors as defined in previous steps. The difference here is that the scorecard highlights deliverables—i.e., what the agent will deliver in 12 to 24 months—as opposed to a job description that typically only lists responsibilities of the position. The objective is to get everyone internally aligned on the position to be filled.
Step 4: Create/Post a Job Description
Top performers often are already employed somewhere and, therefore, are considered “passive” job seekers. The objective is to get passive job seekers to read your job posting and take action.
To do this, you first need to ensure that potential candidates clearly understand what it’s like to work for your organization (i.e., what makes your culture so unique). Next, you need to create a sense of urgency. How? It’s imperative to understand the potential pain points a candidate may be experiencing in their current position. For example, unlike many other call centers, perhaps your call center doesn’t worry about average talk time. If a candidate is passionate about delivering excellent experiences and currently has a job in which they have limits on how long they can spend on a call with a customer, this may be very appealing to them. You can also gain additional insights from top performers in your organization—ask them what made them leave their previous job and why they enjoy working for you.
Once the hiring manager and HR team create a draft of a job description, have an experienced copywriter (ideally someone who writes advertisements) write the final job description. Why? Your job description is essentially an advertisement. To hire top talent, you need someone on your team who understands how to grab a reader’s attention and motivate them to take action. Nobody knows this better than an experienced copywriter.
Step 5: Finalize Candidate Experience
The interview experience needs to be consistent for all candidates to ensure a fair assessment. The initial interview should be a phone screening to assess basic phone skills (how the candidate projects over the phone and engages in conversation) and confirm pay range. In addition, identify job fit (by determining what motivates the candidate) and previous ratings—how their previous supervisors would rate them when you eventually conduct reference interviews. You only want to advance those rated very highly.
During round two, you’ll want to assess a candidate’s technical skills and build a story to identify potential trends. Specifically, identify the Three Rs (ratings, roles and responsibilities) for their previous jobs—inquire as far back as 10 to 15 years, when applicable. Then ask why they left each job to build the story.
Include role-plays in the interview process to add a little stress and assess if the candidate understands how to deliver excellent experiences. For example, you can role-play a customer calling in for a product inquiry and pretending the agent’s systems are super slow. While the candidate won’t know product details or systems, look for other attributes that would define a great call, such as attempting to build a connection with the customer, wrapping up the call, call courtesies, etc.
Round three assesses the candidate’s cultural fit (your organization’s desired behaviors) and attitude. During this interview, use behavioral-based interviewing techniques, which have a higher degree of predictability. Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result): For every question you ask, attempt to get a complete STAR by understanding the situation, the task and/or action the candidate took and the result of their actions.
Those who score well in round three may then move on to a series of reference interviews. Don’t settle for references provided; speak with previous supervisors and peers whenever possible. This critical step is often skipped, but it is essential to gain further insights and complete the candidate’s story.
Step 6: Prepare Interview Team
Prepare your team by creating an Interview Guide, which includes the assigned behavioral interview questions to assess attitude and cultural fit. With that said, an interview guide is just that—allow the flexibility for interviewers to go “off-script” as needed.
Step 7: The Interview
Stick to your interview plan, allow for flexibility, but keep certain question types off the table. There are certain types of questions to avoid during the interview process—for example, hypothetical questions. In most instances, candidates may say they’ll do something, but in real-life situations they’ll likely do something totally different. Data has shown that these types of questions should be avoided.
Step 8: Debrief and Hire
In addition to debriefing almost immediately, it’s important that the group—and not the hiring manager—make the final hiring decision. At some point, the hiring manager will eventually leave their position and move into another internal position or leave the company. What’s more, their hiring decision will impact other departments and, in practice, hiring managers will rarely hire someone smarter than themselves.
Organizations such as Google and Warby Parker (online designer and retailer of eyewear) actually have committees that make the hiring decisions. For example, Warby Parker has a cultural SWAT team that conducts 75% of the interviewing process. Organizations do this to preserve the culture and to ensure that the hiring decision is made with the organization’s best interest in mind—not one person’s (hiring manager) decision.
Setting and Managing Performance Expectations
Now that you’ve hired top performers, you’ll have to effectively manage them. Employees need to have expectations made clear during the interview process, be trained on expectations through your onboarding program, and have expectations consistently reinforced once they start taking calls.
The challenge comes when agents either don’t have clear objectives or when expectations are equated with sales goals. For example, Beth has to sell X checking accounts within the next 90 days. While the expectation is there, the process to reach that expectation is unclear. Therefore, simply having a sales goal as a performance metric for a call center agent is typically not a sustainable approach. What if Beth met her quota, but provided only average service to several customers along the way because she wanted only to speak with those who did not already have a checking account?
Coach the Process, Not Results
That’s why it’s imperative to coach your employees on the fundamentals of service, and not just on the outcomes. Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski’s book, Leading with the Heart, makes clear that he never sets a goal to achieve a specific number of wins in a given year. Instead, he believes that if you teach and coach the right fundamentals, then the desired outcomes will follow. This strategy has helped him to become one of the most winning coaches in college history. Similar approaches are taken within the call centers of some of the most highly regarded service-oriented companies. While these organizations do indeed generate a great deal of sales, they coach fundamentals and do not have sales goals within their inbound call centers.
Define A Great Call and Coach Often
The first step in setting clear expectations is clearly defining, in detail, what makes a great and engaging call. Once you do this, you need to find time to coach. Great supervisors find time to coach by making it a priority. You should meet with agents regularly and listen to a few of their calls together. Then, have a discussion and document results and action items (when applicable).
Following this process has many benefits. For starters, the frequent coaching interactions will help expedite the time it takes to achieve desired results. In addition, agents will know exactly where they stand, from a performance perspective, on a regular basis. As a result, the sessions help to make performance review conversations much easier since you will be identifying and having discussions about performance gaps earlier in the process.
Managing Performance Gaps
When agents aren’t meeting expectations, you need to delve deeper to find out why. Specifically, identify if the issue(s) is attitudinal, a technical competency gap or a little of both. Then take appropriate action.
For employees who are giving a sincere effort but don’t have the necessary skill sets developed, further coaching is necessary. Employees who have attitude problems simply need to be let go (you can’t coach attitude). You may be thinking that firing an employee (and doing it rather quickly) is a lot easier to talk about than to do—and this is true for most organizations. However, by setting clear expectations and documenting coaching sessions on a regular basis, it will be evident who is a good fit for your organization and who is not, which will help to expedite the process of firing and promoting.