Now that candidate assessments have been around contact centers for decades, how have they improved the companies that use them? Or have they?
This article will discuss the rise of automated candidate assessments and look at the data driving recent trends like skills-based hiring and artificial intelligence (AI). But first, let’s take a few steps back to understand what candidate assessments are and why they’re beneficial to contact centers.
Early Beginnings and Benefits
While various contact center assessments exist that are designed to evaluate efficiency among different aspects of the company, like operational assessments or technology optimization assessments, candidate assessments didn’t emerge until the early 1990s.
In that decade, the computerized and web-enabled ability to assess candidates became possible. Compared to pen and paper, they allowed employers to assess candidates anywhere, and at any time, with greater cost efficiencies: especially at scale.
Automated candidate assessments provide powerful benefits. For example, Call Centre Helper reported candidate assessments are a better indicator of on-the-job performance compared to interviews. Written by Jo Robinson, it said that at a minimum contact center candidate assessments ensure hiring teams can evaluate candidates and make decisions based on the widest range of evidence available.
Spoiler alert: candidate assessments offer contact centers much more than just standardizing the decision-making process. Consider the following benefits, from PMaps:
- Greater objectivity and fairness because each candidate is judged on the same criteria, as opposed to interviews that can be subjective.
- Improved efficiency because the time to evaluate candidates is greatly reduced.
- Cost efficiency from greater time savings.
- A better candidate experience since assessments can be automated and reduce the number of interviews required in the hiring process.
- The ability to assess more candidates at one time, which is especially important for larger enterprises and in contact centers that may experience high employee turnover.
Depending on the type of candidate assessment, the benefits can vary from time savings to cost savings and more.
Candidate Assessment Types
There are a few common types of assessments that contact centers use for hiring candidates. These include resume screening, psychometric tests (often referred to as behavioral tests), job simulations, and skills assessments.
Resume screening technology is used to sift through a large number of…you guessed it...candidate resumes. But this technology can’t assess a candidate beyond what is written on their resume. Unfortunately we’ve found, through reading the research, that all too many candidates lie on their resumes.
So, even though resume screening can save time, it won’t necessarily lead to better new hires and could potentially screen out qualified candidates.
Psychometric tests are defined as “a standard and scientific method used to measure individuals’ mental capabilities and behavioral style...They identify the extent to which candidates’ personality and cognitive abilities match those required to perform the role.”
This type of testing can help reveal more about a candidate systematically. However, it doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that they will do well in a specific role in a specific industry.
Skills assessments have proven to be extremely effective in contact center environments where high-volume mandates are never-ending.
For example, if someone takes a behavioral test asking them pre-made and multiple choice questions from various scenarios, it doesn’t necessarily guarantee to an employer that this person possesses the key traits needed to be successful in that role. For agents that can be skills like active listening, multitasking, solving problems, and expressing empathy.
Job simulations can help in such instances. Typically, they focus on one specific task, rather than the complete reality of all the tasks that an agent would be required to accomplish in the course of their work.
While psychometric tests, job simulations, and skills assessments have the same purpose, they operate very differently.
Skills assessments leverage what’s known as skills-based hiring. This is an approach to measuring a candidate’s soft and hard skills applicable to a specific role in a particular industry. They then use those skills as leading decision-making criteria in a job hire.
With this method, an automated skills assessment measures the skills required for a specific job for the recruiter, to help narrow down candidates faster and hopefully more effectively. Skills assessments provide candidates with greater and more equal access to opportunities, according to McKinsey, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Why Assessing Skills First Makes Sense
Skills assessments have proven to be extremely effective in contact center environments where high-volume mandates are never-ending.
This approach allows employers to favor a person’s skills or abilities over their experience or a technical degree for example.
By evaluating skills as the top hiring criteria, employers can access hidden talent and effectively replace resume-screening tools, interviews, language tests, psychometric/behavioral tests, and job simulations.
Hard skills have always been the golden standard, but now hiring teams are turning their attention to soft skills.
“We’re seeing a lot about soft skills in the offshore market. No one can teach soft skills, I can’t put anything on a screen that will tell someone how to feel the customer’s problem. The ability to understand if a candidate has empathy, for example, is a differentiator, and those scores and reports are important and allow teams to hire in the B2 range.”
—Ben Chacko, Managing Director, Harte Hanks
One study, reported via the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), revealed that skills-based hires were promoted more often than their degree-hired counterparts for customer service, sales, compliance, finance, and more. In fact, the role with the highest promotion rates within the skills-based hires was call center manager.
If skills-based hires perform just as well as traditional hires (or better!), adopting this method could offer many benefits to contact centers with high-volume hiring needs.
Contact centers that rely on tested skills-based hiring technologies have seen promising results. Our recent article, “Addressing Call Center Turnover Rate,” reported top-skilled agents become top performers on the job. If employers know what skills are needed to get top performance, they can screen for those skills in the hiring process.
The same study demonstrated that these same top-skilled customer service candidates attrit 27 times less than bottom-skilled candidates (see CHART). And for each top-skilled sales agent hired, 9.8 bottom-skilled agents were attrited.
So that also means contact centers that can identify and hire top-skilled agents will experience less attrition later on. This study is supported by findings from BCG, which concluded that skills-based hires had a 9% longer tenure than traditional hires.
In a different sample, from our Performance Report, one call center gained a 10% increase in sales by implementing a skills assessment and following its hiring recommendations. Another organization reported a 400% reduction in bad-hire rates from using a skills assessment.
By hiring for skills early in the hiring process, the call centers mentioned above were able to cut attrition rates, bad hire rates, or increase sales months later. NICE reported that 51% of contact centers believe that they can improve key metrics like CSAT by using an automated tool to measure soft skills.
Of all the types of candidate assessments that contact centers are using today, skills assessments have proven most useful. Skills assessments have demonstrated they are capable of:
- Reducing bias, increasing diversity, and sourcing hidden talent.
- Evaluating specific skills required to do a contact center job automatically.
- Eliminating the need for the other types of candidate assessments.
- Streamlining the hiring process.
- Reducing top contact center problems like attrition.
- Sourcing better quality agents who can deliver better consumer experiences.
These outcomes underscore the relationship between hiring departments and operational departments, namely talent acquisition outcomes will directly impact a company’s strategic growth.
What’s Holding Contact Centers Back?
Outsourced solutions provider PSI Global described how contact centers hired pre-COVID-19 pandemic:
“In the days of in-person interviews and assessments, a candidate could complete a large set of tasks, including drug tests, operations assessments, I-9 paperwork, and typing speed tests, while they were at the contact center facility.”
And how hiring changed as agents started working from home:
“Now, they must complete each of these activities at home in addition to ensuring that their workstation and internet can support the role’s requirements... Candidates can leverage digital tools at home to measure everything from typing and skills to internet and hardware speed.”
The pandemic accelerated the use of automated candidate assessment technology, and yet it’s still difficult to locate vast amounts of data around contact center candidate assessment usage.
If these candidate assessments are so beneficial, then why hasn’t the contact center taken full advantage of them? Why aren’t they everywhere?
There are a few possible explanations.
The Harvard Business Review reported, in the article “When Hiring, Prioritize Assignments Over Interviews” by Geoff Tuff, Steve Goldbach, and Jeff Johnson, most companies have an over-reliance on interviewing during the hiring process. Even though this method has been proven to be a poor predictor of the candidate’s future performance on the job and it can lead to bias.
Indeed, legacy methods have proven to be a top detractor for technology adoption in contact centers. Deloitte reported that the top barriers preventing organizations from taking advantage of skills-based hiring were legacy mindsets/practices.
Another source, an article on RecruitmentMarketing.com, says that navigating the vast amounts of automated assessment tools is difficult as well, especially because they can all vary in experience, size, etc.
On the other hand, it could be as simple as in-house expertise. For example, Kevin Wheeler explains that it takes dedicated IT and data analyst resources, for example, to leverage HR tech: and that can pose a challenge.
AI in Candidate Assessments
Candidate assessment technology, like all other sectors, has adopted AI, helping hiring managers to instantly disqualify candidates. There are AI-powered resume screening tools, psychometric tests, job simulations, and skills assessments on the market today.
AI candidate assessments give hiring teams the ability to make better hiring decisions based on more data points than a human could compute. In a skills assessment, AI can reveal more detailed analyses of a candidate’s skills than a hiring team may have otherwise had access to.
In fact, adding AI into the process enhances the benefits candidate assessments offer all around. Consider that most screening software that is built into common applicant tracking systems rely on keywords to filter candidates.
AI could allow for screening to go beyond keyword filters to showcase skills and talents, says supplier HeyMilo. It says this would give more candidates the opportunity to showcase their abilities, ultimately creating a larger candidate pool and increasing hiring quality.
It is for these exact reasons that assessments with AI are more likely to be widely adopted at this point in time than less sophisticated technologies like binary decision-making tools such as basic resume screening. Along with the notion that contact centers feel like they are missing out if they aren’t adopting AI in some capacity.
AI candidate assessments give hiring teams the ability to make better hiring decisions based on more data points than a human could compute.
Candidate assessments powered by AI can even determine if a person is the right “culture fit” for a business. It’s no wonder that leading companies like Deloitte and Google have incorporated AI-based assessment into their hiring processes.
AI has proven to be a highly effective companion to candidate assessments, but as most customers prefer to interact with a person, it’s important that teams ensure processes don’t lose that critical human touch.
Improving the State of Hiring
Contact centers don’t often have the luxury of thinking at the strategic growth level, since they’re already dealing with competing challenges. Pressures keep mounting and problems persist year after year, while talent becomes scarcer.
Employers may be tempted to automate as much of the contact center as possible to compensate, but it won’t necessarily produce the right outcomes for the end customer. That means contact centers are reliant on human capital, like they have been since their inception.
If contact centers can’t automate their way out of their problems and need humans, they have to get better at sourcing and selecting them.
Skills assessments can help, while giving contact centers the benefits described in the preceding sections: assessing more candidates faster while reducing bad hire rates, attrition, and costs.
Skills-based hiring and AI won’t solve every issue contact centers are facing. But these trending assessment techniques and technologies can certainly help combat some of the top problems, and the industry needs to take note.