Bell Canada Lowers Attrition to 10% with Top of Funnel Assessment
Bell Canada Lowers Attrition to 10% with Top of Funnel Assessment
Background:
Traditional methods, resumes, and interviews often fall short in predicting which hires truly succeed. Sometimes a candidate looks perfect on paper but still fails to meet basic requirements in reality. In high-volume hiring, recruiters just don’t have the hours to dig through hundreds and sometimes thousands of CVs or conduct conventional interviews. They need reliable, systematic methods of evaluating candidates at scale.
At Bell, there are over 100 skills that are measured amongst the thousands of agents hired per year. For this global telecom giant, it’s not just a numbers game; it’s a quality challenge. Speed matters just as much as ensuring candidates genuinely possess the necessary soft skills to excel.
Problem:
Before HiringBranch, the Bell candidate experience wasn’t ideal. Applicants would spend up to four hours on a behavioural and language assessment, neither of which was mobile, and the hiring team could tell that some candidates were cheating. Candidate drop-out rates were as high as 30% per stage of the hiring process post-pandemic. Even 25% of the candidates who made it through to training were failing due to poor communication skills. For Bell, it was never just about meeting hiring quotas; it was about maximizing the quality of service they offer their customers by hiring the right people.
To ensure that they can offer the best service to their clients, Bell looks for agents with great soft skills. Why? Agents now have to use multiple systems to support technical, sales, loyalty, and customer service all at once. They need to have technical skills, people skills, and be able to navigate the processes to solve customer problems, all while the customer is on the line. The level of skills like adaptability and resilience that the agent is required to have is even greater in the position than it used to be. That’s why it's critical that candidates demonstrate the foundational soft skills required from their very first day on the job.
Solution:
Soft Skills Assessments,
Hard Performance Data
Managing multiple sites, it became critical to have a solution that would help maintain a level of agent quality and understand the recruitment funnel as well. To ensure Bell's customer-first strategy was supported across the globe, they needed language and soft skills-based assessments to standardize the initial steps of recruitment and remove potential biases. Bell partnered with HiringBranch to integrate AI-powered soft skills assessments into their ATS workflow.
“We now rely on AI and skills-oriented scenarios demonstrating the skills and behaviors of candidates that determine if they are the best fit for the roles available. Since soft skills are so important for our Quality vision, this ensures that candidates have what it takes to begin their journey with us.” - Veronique LaCasse, Senior Recruiting, Training & Onboarding Manager
Here’s what the hiring process looks like today:
- Human‑led, AI‑enhanced: Candidates engage in job-like simulations in HiringBranch rather than scripted interviews, assessing skills like empathy, communication, and critical thinking in action
- Tailored and predictive: The assessments mimic real-world tasks specific to roles, making performance highly predictive of job success, and allow candidates to self-screen out
- Recruiter‑centric feedback: The system generates data that feeds back into recruiting, onboarding, and training loops—empowering recruiters with hard evidence of performance outcomes
10%
45%
Results:
As Bell assesses the candidate’s skills, they match it to a variety of qualitative and quantitative metrics to validate the agent's propensity to succeed as well as build personalized recommendations for support post-training and onboarding. Cross-functional data analysis and correlations from pre-hire to performance on the job help the team make global conclusions. The Recruiting, Training, and Onboarding Team can leverage data-driven hiring decisions and determine their ROI as a result of their analyses, not to mention recruiters also feel great in the process, knowing the hiring risks they took paid off.
Integrating HiringBranch soft skills assessments into Bell’s high-volume hiring process has delivered measurable benefits:
- Candidates shortlisted through assessments are faster to hire and more likely to stay in the process, reducing dropout rates mid-funnel
- Time spent interviewing is intentionally reduced because there has been such a strong correlation between assessment scores and high performance
- High-quality, skilled new hires make it to proficiency faster, with 45% of agents meeting Q1-Q2 performance quartile in the first 30 days
- Attrition down to 10% at day 90, saving money and also improving recruiter confidence with data confirming performance, reinforcing human judgment with objective metrics
- Hiring quality standardization across sites and departments in an unbiased and stable environment for a high CX standard
“The impact on our business is very positive. …it reduces the time spent in interviews due to the correlation of scoring with performance. … it's a win on cost, efficiency, and productivity.”
- Veronique LaCasse, Senior Recruiting, Training & Onboarding Manager
Bell’s approach turns intuition into intelligence, enabling predictive hiring that’s human at its core. It exemplifies the shift from reactive, gut-based hiring to strategic, data-driven talent acquisition. At Bell, AI doesn't replace recruiters; it makes them smarter and more confident. This model holds meaningful potential for any organization grappling with scale, speed, and quality in hiring.
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