3 Best Practices for Mobile Talent Assessment.
The massive growth and capability of mobile devices has made a significant impact on talent assessment. Millennial job candidates do everything on their phones, including applying for jobs. New mobile technologies offer key advantages to contact centers, enabling them to streamline their hiring processes and expand their access to the best new talent. At the same time, mobile hiring also presents significant challenges to recruiters and hiring managers who are striving to gain a complete picture of a candidate’s suitability for the contact center agent role.
To help you overcome these challenges and make the best use of mobile hiring tools, we’ve outlined three best practices.
1. Identify Agent Success Factors
The first step in optimizing your talent assessment process is to identify the key factors that determine success at your contact center. Every organization is different, but there are several consistent factors that contact centers look for in successful new hires:
- Pleasant and courteous with customers
- Great detectives that listen closely and uncover what’s important to each customer
- Problem solvers that can follow policies and procedures
- Efficient screen navigators and keyboard operators to avoid “dead air” and extended call handling times that lead to customer frustration
- Confident when positioning solutions, negotiating payment terms, and overcoming objections by connecting them back to customer needs
- Effective verbal communicators that are easy to understand and put customers at ease
Once you’ve defined the success factors for your organization, you can then determine the right tools for assessing those factors.
2. Use Mobile Technology to Expand Access and Target Success Factors
A key to successful contact center hiring is to use the right technologies for the right outcome. Research strongly suggests that the most accurate form of talent assessment is simulation. And the good news is that you can effectively measure many of the factors listed above on simulations that are mobile friendly.
By using simulations that immerse candidates in realistic job situations, you can accurately predict how they will perform for real once on the job. With the exception of screen navigation and keyboarding, you can measure all these important things with well-designed simulations delivered on mobile devices. And by adding a mobile friendly automated screening interview to the process, you can quickly and efficiently hear and evaluate candidates’ verbal communication ability as well.
Imagine assessing all of that in around 30 minutes – before job candidates ever walk through your door! This leads to greater efficiency, improved cycle time, and minimal drop rate. Given these gains, it’s easy to see how mobile talent assessments can play a key role in contact center talent acquisition.
3. Confirm Screen Navigation and Multitasking with Computer-based Tools
For many contact center roles, the importance of screen navigation, data entry, and multitasking is paramount. So be careful not to abandon computer-based assessments. If your target job is highly dependent on those abilities, consider adding an assessment that provides a direct measure of performance. Since these activities are performed on the job via computer, they should be assessed on a computer. Computer-based talent assessments can easily be added as part of a remote process. If you prefer to offer a purely mobile pre-screening experience, you can administer a computer-based assessment on site or as a remote follow up to the initial process.
The most important thing to consider is what is most critical for your center. Your business needs should always drive the talent assessment process. Measure what is most important, and the good news is you can do much of that by “going mobile.”
Hire Great People FAST!
You might say contact centers are in our DNA. There’s no industry we know better . . . and there’s no industry where we’ve had more impact. For a free consultation about streamlining and optimizing hiring at your contact center, contact me today!