The ultimate guide for Call Center Volume Hiring Strategies
As you know, the call center is a tough industry that serves an immense number of people throughout the day.
Each call center company needs enough number of employees to handle the customers and requests. So, it needs to conduct the so-called call center volume hiring. How?
First, let’s understand what volume hiring for call centers means and the challenges you could face during and after the volume hiring process. Then we’ll help you eliminate those challenges through some contact center volume hiring strategies.
What is Volume Hiring?
Volume hiring is about hiring a large number of candidates in a short period of time. This large number begins with hundreds and may reach thousands of employees, and the short period may be a month.
In the call center sector, volume hiring happens regularly because of the high turnover that has become a vital issue. So, call center always needs large numbers of employees especially call agents and live chat agents.
What are The Challenges of Volume Hiring and How to Solve Them?
Before considering the challenges you face during the volume hiring stages, you should look at the volume hiring as a whole in the call center industry.
This will help you understand the root problem of volume hiring: it is a never-ending process.
Call center companies need to hire a huge number of agents many times during one year due to the high turnover rate! This high turnover rate requires volume hiring again and again! So, it’s a vicious circle.
You can overcome this challenge by approaching the volume hiring process with the best call center recruiting strategies, making it easy, well-organized, and fast.
Discover some of those strategies here:
Job task analysis:
Job task analysis defines the call center agents’ tasks and subtasks.
For example, a task such as answering inbound calls should be analyzed into subtasks, including understanding the customer’s queries, paying attention to details, solving the problem, and following up with the customer.
This analysis helps you:
1) Evaluate your candidates accurately.
By understanding the tasks and subtasks of this job, you’ll be able to identify the required experience, skills, and behavior for every single task.
This will give your HR team sufficient job standards they can use to evaluate candidates. This way, you can ensure a professional evaluation of candidates and more accurate hiring decisions.
2) Define the right salary.
To avoid employee dissatisfaction due to lower salaries, rely on the job task analysis to define the right salary your candidates deserve.
The right salary shouldn’t be determined only based on their years of experience but also according to their skills, behavior, and the number and difficulty of tasks.
3) Define needed training.
The call center job now is not just about answering phone calls. Information and communication technologies (ICT) have changed many job functions and the way of interacting with customers.
That is why you need agents with excellent technical skills to perform their roles, such as dealing with chatbots and IVR (Interactive Voice Response).
Accordingly, before beginning the hiring process, you should determine whether you will accept candidates inexperienced in call center technology.
If yes, then you need to plan a proper training program based on the job task analysis you did.
Make data-driven decisions.
Leveraging the power of your data is an effective contact center volume hiring strategy. You can rely on the data in two stages:
1) Before applying a new strategy to the hiring process.
Our suggestion for new strategies doesn’t mean you have to avoid all your old strategies. But you have to evaluate each strategy based on the data you have. Then, see which strategies gave you better hiring quality and which ones didn’t.
So, you can reuse the effective old strategies and integrate them with the new ones we recommend. This way, you can ensure the highest hiring quality out of your process.
2) During the hiring process.
While hiring is in progress, you shouldn’t stop receiving applications. If the candidate pool reaches the required number you planned for or even exceeds it, that doesn’t mean you’ll find the required number of qualified candidates to hire.
Accordingly, you should always watch and analyze data such as registration, matching, and completion rates. These metrics help you identify issues earlier and try more strategies until you find the best ones for the perpetual volume hiring.
After we defined all the challenges of volume hiring, let’s have a deeper look at each stage of the process on its own.
Challenges and Solutions of Sourcing in Call Center Volume Hiring:
Sourcing for volume hiring differs from regular hiring because it needs:
A huge number of CVs to sift through:
In the volume hiring process, when a company needs to hire a certain number of employees, it should source at least five times that number, so it can get the required number of qualified candidates.
It means —for call center hiring— if the recruiters need to have 600 call center agents, they must sift through 3000 CVs to filter irrelevant CVs, CVs with fewer years of experience, or lack the required skills. Then they can get the required number of qualified candidates.
Higher costs for external resources:
According to HubSpot Annual State of Service Report – 2022, “Almost 40% of customer service leaders say that their companies view customer service workforce as an expense instead of a driver for growth.” This is due to reasons such as the continuous need for volume hiring.
The continuous need for volume hiring means that all the hiring, training, and mentoring processes may be repeated many times in one year. And every time, a considerable part of the cost goes to external resources, such as social media ads and recruitment agencies.
For social media, It is essential for contact center companies to post job announcements through social media platforms to get enough applicants.
But is it enough to just publish job posts on the company page? Unfortunately, the correct answer is NO, it isn’t!
This could be enough if you hire two or three employees, but in volume hiring and for a job like a call center agent, you must run paid ads to ensure your job post will reach thousands of people to sift through.
In addition, when you need to hire large numbers in a short period, you have to use all the available means to source candidates.
That is why many answering service companies use recruitment agencies which also require an additional budget.
What Strategies Can Be Used to Solve Such Problems?
Let technology help you:
Leverage the technology power and forget this hassle!
Recruitment software now gets your back through the whole process of volume hiring, starting from sourcing to finding your ideal candidates.
For sourcing, the applicant tracking software (ATS) provides a huge number of candidates for call center positions. The best recruitment software provides you with an immense number of CVs that may reach 250 million candidates’ databases. Therefore, you can ensure a constant flow of CVs that will make you always ready whenever your company needs volume hiring.
Build great employer branding:
Employer branding means how you present your company to people in the market. Good employer branding will attract the best candidates to apply for any job vacancy in your company once you announce it.
You can apply this via social media posts on many platforms, especially Linkedin. These posts should showcase that the work environment in your company is friendly, professional, engaging, and flexible. For example, you can post employees’ birthday celebrations, anniversaries, training, company outings, etc.
In addition, your existing employees are your company’s ambassadors.
They can recommend your company to their friends and give them good feedback about it.
Remember that the call center market is full of competitors, all of whom have the same problem of volume hiring and do their best to attract candidates.
So, this strategy should be long-term, as you must always be in front of candidates even before they become job seekers.
Challenges and Solutions of Pre-screening In Call Center Volume Hiring:
As we mentioned above, recruiters need to have many CVs to sift through and find the best candidates. So, screening all CVs takes significant time and effort that can be allocated to more valuable tasks.
For instance, your HR team needs time for handling disciplinary actions, training, maintaining workplace safety, etc. Keep in mind that you need to keep your existing employees happy, satisfied, and motivated to avoid the turnover problem.
What can you do then?
You need to automate the pre-screening step. Recruitment software filter all CVs in a blink of an eye. All you have to do is to determine the keywords for the job role you need and let the software filter the CVs based on these keywords.
Challenges of the screening process and how to deal with them:
Screening is a crucial stage in the hiring process. Thus, it should be done professionally, from the first interview to the final analysis of assessments.
However, screening has two main problems in the volume hiring case:
Needs enough number of HR employees:
In the hiring process, you have many steps any HR should go through. Those steps are sourcing, application filtration, assessment, interviewing, selection and onboarding.
That means if the call center companies need volume hiring, then they should plan for having a large number of HR specialists. So, call center companies must allocate enough budget for HR staff’s monthly salaries.
Takes a very long time:
In addition to the time spent filtering CVs, screening takes a long time to interview such a large number of candidates and assess them.
During this period of time, talented candidates may get job offers from other companies. Often, they accept those offers as they didn’t receive a quick response from you, and you lose them to your competitors.
How can recruitment software help you overcome those challenges?
Recruitment software also gets you covered in this stage. It provides you with workflow templates that you can customize according to your company system.
This workflow includes the following:
Interviews:
AI conducts interviews with all candidates and prepares a deep analysis to make it easier for HR managers to make a decision faster.
Updates:
The hiring process has many steps, and with volume hiring, those steps are more confusing and liable to remember. So, ATS enables you to automate sending updates to your team to remind them of what to do next.
Assessments:
Recruitment software conducts all needed assessments like personality skills, and technical assessments.
Engagement:
ATS helps recruiters keep in touch with all recruiters to avoid late responses.
How can this help in the volume hiring?
1- It helps you define all hiring processes the HR team should go through and assign tasks to them, so the hiring process goes smoothly across all employees.
2- Thanks to ATS automated processes, the HR team can allocate their effort to mind-based tasks, so they perform well and focus more on quality, not quantity.
3- It allows candidates to move smoothly and quickly through the hiring process.
4- It speeds up the hiring process, solves the late response problem, and keeps talented candidates interested in getting your job offer
5- Instead of being unconsciously biased by beauty, affinity, or any other type of bias, AI automated interviews provide the HR team with the analysis needed to help them make decisions based on the candidate’s qualifications and job requirements.
To sum up, call centers should deal with volume hiring as a feature, not a dilemma, as they will always need it to face turnover. It requires trying strategies and monitoring their results till you can mix and match the successful ones that really help you.
