How to interview 20,000 people a year

How can you screen your applicant's communication and soft skill abilities, accurately and cost-effectively? This is a challenge faced by contact centers around the world.

One of our clients screens hundreds ofapplicants every day for voice and chat skills at multiple sites in the Philippines. Their clients want quick, accurate and cost-effective solutions that are automated in order to eliminate human interference from testing. The challenge is to find the right balance between automation and accuracy.

Automated Speech Evaluation

Thesolution is to combine automated speech communication screening with human scoring of voice recordings.This hybrid approach scores fundamental skills including listening comprehension, grammar, multi-tasking, spoken pronunciation, chat and recorded responses requiring use of soft skills. All can easily becustomized within the framework, for maximum flexibility and convenience.

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Limiting human bias improves consistency

The applicants recorded speech adds vital information to the assessment. It allows recruiters to evaluate an applicant’s ability to perform live soft skills under pressure using automated and human evaluation. The human evaluator can also check for specific responses the automation may have missed (hint: humans do sarcasm better).

This is an advantage compared to text-based assessments, that require recognition of situational responses without the requirement to demonstrate the appropriate skill.

Working in collaboration with our clients, we have developed and calibrated the 20-minute communication test that has successfully processed hundreds of thousands of applicants in multiple sites.

We are now developing an intelligent soft skill evaluation engine that can automatically score free recordings on specific parameters within our soft skill testing framework. This test will predict the top prospects out of large applicant pools based on key performance indicators and increase the number of high performing employees in the organization.

It's great to see recruitment processes succeed whenautomation is applied in the right place at the right time.

Patricia Macleod is co-founder at HiringBranch.com and helps organizations find and develop high-performing communicators.