How Hiring for Skills Helped JustPressOne Reduce Absenteeism and Boost Job Performance

Summary

Specialized BPO came to HiringBranch to explore conversational assessments and finds a correlation between skills and absenteeism.

Background

Always looking to strengthen their hiring strategy, JustPressOne, under the leadership of CEO Janice Salmon, identified an opportunity to enhance how candidate potential was assessed. While traditional pre-employment multiple-choice tests offered some insights, the team recognized the value of a more dynamic approach. By adopting a conversational, skills-based assessment with HiringBranch, they gained a deeper understanding of candidate capabilities. In collaboration with the HiringBranch research team, they also uncovered a valuable correlation between skill scores and attendance—unlocking new ways to hire smarter and build stronger teams.

Challenge

JustPressOne, a U.S.-based business outsourcing provider with operations in the Philippines, serves the specialized and complex world of home appliance service. Unlike traditional call centers, each agent handles a different customer need and agents are not scripted.

Their hiring process relied on off-the-shelf multiple-choice assessments—first with a legacy language tool, then with a modern testing platform. The legacy language tool was inflexible and the more flexible modern testing tool led to poorer quality and was likely a factor in already excellent attrition rates doubling from 4% to 8% at month 6.

Solution

JustPressOne partnered with HiringBranch to explore a more tailored approach: skill-based assessments that simulate real contact center scenarios. Before relying on the tool at the top of the funnel, they wanted proof it worked.

All new hires were assessed post-hire using HiringBranch’s platform so we had the soft skill profiles for all new agents. A few months later, the HiringBranch research team conducted a detailed correlation analysis comparing assessment results with actual agent performance—spanning QA scores, absenteeism rates, and handle times across 85–88 agents.

Results

Strong performance correlations

HiringBranch’s data analysis revealed compelling insights:

• Positive Correlation with QA Scores: Employees who scored higher on the HiringBranch assessment consistently earned better quality assurance ratings.
• Negative Correlation with Absenteeism: Lower assessment scores predicted higher absenteeism, indicating that disengaged employees were easier to spot—before hiring. In fact, the HiringBranch ‘below-standard’ score group were 63% more likely to be absent than those in the ‘passed’ group.
• Clear Differences in Soft Skills: Employees with over 15% absenteeism showed significantly lower scores in customer and quality focus skill categories.

These insights gave JustPressOne the confidence to move the assessment earlier in the hiring process. As one leader noted, agents who scored low tended to fail out of training more often - and now they can avoid those mis-hire costs, improve attrition and continue offering the customer service excellence to their valued clients.