Online Testing in Call Centre Recruitment

A recent industry survey by the Contact Centre Association reports that throughout 2004, there was to be a 68% growth in contact centre workforce size, with 72% of that growth being accounted for by core business growth and demand.



This compliments the official Department for Trade and Industry report which showed that call centres in the UK are set to recruit an extra 300,000 workers over the next 3 years.

Service centres are integral to the public sector modernisation agenda and to the extension of e-service modes of delivery. Substantial expansion is forecast over the coming years.

Many call/contact centres report difficulties in attracting and more dramatically, retaining staff. In response, Norfolk County Council Customer Service Centre, through ConsultingTools, focused on systematically selecting service centre staff, using Facet5, in the form of ìAuditionî

Facet5 is an online psychometric tool, based on the ìBig Fiveî theory of personality. Audition is an on-line process. This means that selection decisions are not delayed by having to wait for results to be produced, having qualified scorers available, interpreting results, etc.

Norfolk County Council established their Customer Service Centre with substantial growth plans. By mid 2005, there will be an indicative yearly call volume of 1,000,000 calls covering 6 service areas and 12 product areas.

To meet their targets, the number of people in the Centre will grow two-fold, from its present base of 20 to 60 people, in about 12 months.

The Process

Audition, on the basis of research, identifies a specific Facet5 profile that is linked to the behavioural requirements of a particular ìroleî; sorting candidates into a close fit, average fit, or a poor fit. By applying Audition to the responses given by a particular candidate, recruiters are given clear interview guidelines, particular to that candidate. These interview probes are designed to focus on those areas where the candidate matches (or does not match) the ideal profile and to explore and qualify this ìfitî so that recruitment decisions can be made with added confidence.

An audition template can be based on either statistical research (where there is a large amount of historical data) or on detailed analysis of the recruitment guidelines including, for example, position descriptions. In this case, since the customer Service Centre was newly created, the latter approach was adopted.

Audition as an Aid to Interviewing

Audition has been designed to provide not only a robust and rapid method of sorting between candidates, but as an aid to interviewing. This is especially valuable in installing consistent selection systems, free of bias and with greatly reduced subjectivity. Audition employs criterion based interviewing where a set of interview guides are generated with specific interview questions. This provides clear indications of what areas should be explored. Audition incorporates a set of behavioural and situational questions and these can be further refined and put in the context of an organisationís operating environment in order to capture more precisely their corporate culture and style.

Audition can be used as an online recruitment aid specifically designed for a defined role, based upon the ëcurrent candidateí and ëideal candidateí results.