How to Hire the Best Contact Center Agents

If you’ve posted an opening for a contact center agent position, I bet you’ve gotten a lot of applications. Congratulations! But now, it’s time to make sure you’re hiring for the right fit.

It costs organizations anywhere from a few thousand dollars to well over $10,000 dollars to invest in onboarding experience. Not to mention, turnover in contact centers is anywhere between 30 and 40%.

Yikes.

Here are two guidelines to help make sure you’re not going to lose money — and time — when those applications roll in.

Setup a streamlined process

I’ve worked in some organization’s where they require a candidate to interview at least 10 to 15 times. If it’s a frontline position, that’s way too many interviews. You risk losing the candidate in the hiring process.

After they’ve made it through the initial screen, I’d recommend the hiring manager evaluate their skills, experience and team fit. Followed by the hiring manager’s leader for aptitude, knowledge and organizational fit. Then, the final interview with the leader should be for the position and cultural fit.

Certainly, you can conduct each of these in one panel interview, but what I found that works best is separate interviews framed by an interview guide.

Create an interview guide

I started using an interview guide many years ago and found them helpful across a variety of roles.  What’s important is each interviewer has their own guide or a shared guide. A candidate can get disillusioned quickly with answering the same question multiple times with different interviewers.

The guide should have five sections:

1. Get acquainted: Learn about the candidate and share areas of common interest.
2. Background: The candidate should share their background and thoroughly answer questions.
3. Situational questions: These can be several questions peppered through the guide.
   1. For the hiring manager to understand skill and experience, ask questions to describe a situation where the candidate had to demonstrate how they influenced an outcome, how did they use their skills and what was the result.
   2. For the next leader, set up scenarios or what-ifs based on the candidate’s experience and how would they handle a situation.
   3. For the final interview, focus on the cultural fit. For example, customer experience is at the forefront of most centers. In this case, asking a candidate to describe their best customer experience they’ve received is revealing.
4. Candidate fit: These are the fun questions that can be spread throughout the interview, such as:
   1. How would you describe yourself in three words or phrases or share you strengths and how would you use them best to enjoy your day?
   2. What are the things you didn’t like to do in past jobs, but had to anyway?
   3. When is the last time you failed at something or something didn’t go as planned?
5. Candidate questions and organization selling: If a candidate doesn’t come to the interview with questions, that’s a red flag.

Competing for frontline talent needs the same rigor and consistency as hiring for supervisors and up.  They are your voice; the representative of your organization. They have the opportunity to turn an occasional customer into a lifetime customer with each interaction. Hire well and expect the best.