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In The Press: Product Alert: Best Practices: Case Study:
23rd Annual SIOP Conference
April 10 - 12, 2008 - San Francisco, California SHRM Staffing Management Conference April 14-16, 2008 - Nashville, Tennessee HCI Government Breakfast: Career Management: Building your Talent Pipeline to Meet Current and Future Mission Demands April 16, 2008 - Washington, D.C. Webinar: Driving Improved Business Results with Pre-Employment Assessments April 29, 2008 - 2 pm (EST) Talent Management: Strategies 2008 May 5-7, 2008 - Scottsdale, Arizona Society for Human Resource Management Conference and Expo June 22-24, 2008 - Chicago, Illinois IQPC Call Center Week June 22 - 26, 2008 - Las Vegas, Nevada 
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Best Practices: 1. Executive Summary Scientific assessment of candidate competencies and skills helps employers hire better call center agents who will stay longer. Decades of research across thousands of organizations clearly shows that valid pre-employment assessment tools, including tests, simulations, and interviews, produce a clear return on investment (ROI) when used in hiring decisions. Candidates, who score higher on assessments of job-relevant competencies and skills ramp up faster, perform better against key call center metrics, and turnover less than do lower-scoring candidates. Well designed assessment programs can also improve hiring process efficiency and provide enhanced legal defensibility through the use of objective tools and professional best practices. 2. The Science of Hiring Hiring for call center jobs is challenging. Recruiters, hiring Managers, Human Resources Directors, Operations Managers, and anyone else who shares the responsibility for staffing contact centers all want to know:
Effectively identifying high-potential candidates requires a more sophisticated approach than resume reviews and background checks, because experience doesn’t tell the whole story. Organizations that go beyond experience and assess candidates’ skills and competencies in the hiring processes have seen:
Whenever there are more job candidates than positions available, employers need to make hiring decisions. Good hiring decisions result in employees who perform well in their jobs and do not turn over too quickly, whereas bad hiring decisions produce lower performance and reduced business impact. Thus, rather than leave hiring decisions to luck, employers have sought tools and processes that enable better decisions and that improve business outcomes. Fortunately, there has been tremendous progress over the past 100 years or so in behavioral sciences such as Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Psychometrics. These disciplines utilize data-driven scientific methods to solve real-world challenges, such as how to best evaluate candidates during the hiring process. The result of over a century of scientific developments is a comprehensive set of tools and proven approaches for making better hiring decisions. Hiring decisions do not happen in a vacuum, though. There is a competitive market for talent, which means that efficiency in the hiring process matters, too. Employers need tools that reliably uncover information about candidate readiness and potential - and they need this information before the candidate either drops out of the process or accepts another offer. Therefore, the tools for evaluating candidates must be easy to use and valued by end-users, and they should keep candidates engaged during the application process. And, of course, these tools and processes need to be fair to all candidates and defensible in the event of a legal challenge or administrative audit. In short, employers want a candidate evaluation process that predicts who will make a successful call center agent and who will not. The process needs to be straightforward, and perceived as reasonable and useful by both decision-makers and job candidates. The process should be objective and fair, assessing candidates on job-relevant characteristics. A scientific approach to hiring using pre-employment assessment can help meet these goals. 3. What is Assessment? Pre-employment assessment is the systematic evaluation of candidates’ skills and competencies using tools such as internet-based tests and structured interviews. Professionally developed, valid assessment tools have been shown across hundreds of research studies to predict on-the-job behavior and key call center performance metrics such as customer service, retention, call handle time, and dollars sold/collected. Assessing candidates using job-relevant tests and interviews helps employers make better hiring decisions that drive business results.
Assessment is available in a variety of forms and formats, ranging from multiple choice computer-based tests with automated scoring to structured behavioral interviews administered by trained interviewers. Assessments are used to measure a wide range of human attributes - everything from personality traits that describe people’s motivations and social competencies, to skills and abilities like computer usage and problem-solving, Assessments can even be designed to assess candidate’s interest in specific job roles, for example through "job fit" tests and simulations that provide realistic job previews of the call center work environment and sample agent job tasks. In most cases, using a combination of assessment types during the hiring process will provide a more comprehensive assessment of candidates than will using just a single type of test (e.g., skills). The more you know about your candidates, the better your prediction of performance is, and the bigger the business impact from your hiring decisions.
4. Assessment Drives ROI Value is defined in the eye of the beholder. As such, a successful selection system is one that helps organizations achieve their hiring and business goals. From the employer’s perspective, the return on investment (ROI) for resources spent on hiring generally fall into three main categories:
Effectiveness ROI is all about the top- and bottom-line revenue impact of having higher performing call center agents. Here’s how it works. Within your candidate pool, some people would be more successful as call center agents based on their readiness and their potential. By identifying aspects of readiness and potential during the hiring process, through the use of proven quality filters like valid pre-employment assessment tools, organizations make better informed hiring decisions that result in better hires and better call center performance. Efficiency ROI refers to the cost savings associated with more efficient processes and workflow. For example, the use of assessments early in the Talent Acquisition Funnel can result in saved Recruiter time. By utilizing a valid Screening assessment right after the candidate completes application form and basic qualifications, Recruiters could immediately save 30% of the time spent processing the least qualified candidates (e.g., reviewing resumes) and focus that time instead on attracting and engaging the highest scoring candidates who are more likely to be successful and to be retained. Compliance refers to both the internal compliance with the intended uses of the assessment program, as well as compliance with relevant laws and guidelines for use of testing in employment decisions. Successful assessment programs rely on correct usage of the tools, and system features like score reports become important. How will score information be used in the hiring decision? In terms of legal risk, many experts would say that good assessment programs actually reduce risks associated with hiring because of the inclusion of standardized, objective tools in the process. Professional best practices and a number of published standards provide strong guidance to employers regarding the processes to follow to create assessment programs that work" and that are more likely to be deemed "legal" in the event of a challenge. Professional Services are often required to conduct the analyses and appropriately document findings in order to both maximize program impact and minimize legal risk. 5. How Assessment Works Assessment works by providing information on candidate readiness and potential. In terms of readiness, the skills, knowledge, and experience that new employees arrive with certainly affect how well they perform on the job. In general, more job-relevant experience, knowledge, and skill is better, all other things being equal. And for a variety of specialty roles, like Technical Support or IT positions, job-relevant skills and experience are critical, must-have criteria for successful hires. Thus, valid assessment of these candidate characteristics will add tremendous value in the hiring process. However, for many entry-level jobs, requiring too much experience or advanced skills may actually interfere with an employer’s ability to fill the jobs. There is a reason why call center recruiters sometimes fall back on the classic "mirror test", when any warm body sounds like a better option than a cold empty seat – sourcing is tough! Setting knowledge, skill, and experience standards too high can make it even tougher to fill classes or make placements. In addition, for many entry-level roles, it may be possible to train new employees to effective performance levels on key job skills within a reasonable period of time. Both of these situations show that assessment of candidate readiness is only one part of the story. Other characteristics like employee’s personality, interests, and abilities combine to predict one’s potential for long-term performance. Predictive competency-based assessments of potential that are aligned with job requirements can produce powerful business impact. Candidates whose dispositions and patterns of behavior are aligned with the work behaviors required in the role are more likely to be successful. For example, tests of service-orientation can predict the quality of customer service provided. Candidates whose interests and work-style preferences are aligned with characteristics of the work environment are more likely to be retained, and tests of "job fit" have been shown to be effective predictors of employee retention. A key aspect of setting up effective assessment programs is the process of linking the assessment tools to the job requirements. The challenge employers face is that there are too many assessments available! Which one, or two, or three tests should I use? What competencies should I interview for? Fortunately, scientific processes such as job analysis have been developed to formally study and describe jobs. Assessment tools are evaluated for their usefulness (i.e., validity) following rigorous protocol that involve collection of real-world employee data and a variety of statistical analyses. Both readiness and potential are important for hiring success. Assessing candidates for job-related skills, knowledge, and experience can make hiring decisions more effective, particularly when "day one" readiness is an important staffing goal. And assessing for job-related competencies helps to identify candidates with a higher likelihood of successful performance in the long-term. Some process for identifying and prioritizing the attributes to be assessed is needed in order to maximize the impact of candidate testing time. Job analysis, content validity, criterion-related validity, and validity generalization are tools in the scientists’ toolkit that help employers maximize the impact of assessment on hiring decisions. 6. ROI Case Study
7. Using Assessments in Hiring Designing the overall hiring process can be tricky. There is only so much recruiter/hiring-manager time available with candidates based on practical constraints (e.g., cycle time, number of recruiters, and seats-to-fill). Also, candidates limit their participation in the application and evaluation process based on the desirability of the job, local labor market conditions, and your employment brand among other factors. There are also considerations regarding the configuration of the assessment tools and their placement in the overall process. For example, evaluating candidates through remote testing is different that evaluating candidates through onsite supervised testing. Assessment is a critical part of the broader selection system that manages candidates and employees during the job-application and evaluation process. While information from scientific pre-employment assessment is a key driver of the value generated by the hiring process, there are many other elements in a good hiring process. Successful selection systems integrate candidate assessment within an overall staffing process in a way that makes sense given a company’s hiring challenges. In good systems, candidates have realistic expectations and receive appropriate communication regarding the position and the application process. Similarly, employees understand their roles in engaging and evaluating candidates, and know how to work with the technologies, processes, and decision-rules that have been created for the program. Assessment processes can be setup differently depending on the specific hiring challenges a company is facing. For example, pre-employment assessment often is used early in the hiring process to help "screen out" the least qualified among many candidates, and is used later in the hiring process to help "select in" candidates with the most potential. Assessments requiring as few as 15 minutes of candidate time can be predictive of key call center metrics and can produce powerful business results. In general, though, the more you can assess about candidates, the more informed your hiring decision will be. Determining how assessments will be deployed within your overall hiring process is an important consideration when building an assessment program.
8. In Conclusion Employers have turned to science for help with hiring - and science produces results. To experience the best results from hiring, employers should ensure that the assessment tools they use are:
Hiring decisions need to be made. Take control! Effective assessment of candidate skills and competencies drives better hiring decisions and improves business results. To retrieve a study on how over 29 organizations improved their ROI through the use of assessment in the hiring process, please download our Business Outcomes Studies Report.
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