In-House Contact Center Finds Interviews Useless

Summary

1500 agent call center replaces face-to-face interviews with HiringBranch and sees better quality hires, while freeing up loads of time for the hiring team.

Introduction

When this contact center veteran of 20 years left a business process outsourcing firm to go in-house as Operations Director with a tech giant, he knew one thing: he did not want to use a legacy language test to assess his candidates. It never produced trustworthy results for him in the past.

This is a story about one HiringBranch customer and their journey implementing a no-interview hiring model.

Problem

Language assessments and manual interviews aren't good enough

Language assessments and manual interviews weren't effective for this contact center that received 300 job applications a week. They had 15 hiring managers conducting non-stop, face-to-face interviews to decide (subjectively) which candidates to train and hire. This went on for one year under the new Operations Director… until he found HiringBranch.

Solution

Assess more than language in a streamlined test

Impressed with the HiringBranch assessment, the Operations Director had his team of 15 managers try it too. After meeting internally to discuss the assessment experience, here's what the Director had to say:

Interviews become useless, recruiters wary

The team agreed to pilot HiringBranch on a batch of candidates.

After piloting HiringBranch, the results were so impressive that hiring managers deemed interviews useless. The managers felt that candidates who pass HiringBranch were ‘hire worthy’.

While the hiring managers were excited at the prospect of not having to interview, recruiters worried that HiringBranch’s pass threshold was too strict and would decrease the volume of candidate throughput. The operations and recruitment teams were now at odds.

Results

Bringing Recruiting and Operations Together

Both recruiters and operations agreed on a test to determine which model satisfied both groups and proved to be the most economical. After a candidate passed the recruiter screening, they would take the HiringBranch assessment and depending on how that candidate scored they would either go straight to job offer or have to take an interview.

The scoring rubric was broken down as such:

• High pass: straight to job offer
• Low pass: straight to job offer
• Fail: sent to an operational interview (with the call center hiring manager)

After 45 days, the test revealed that the percentage of fails who passed an operational interview and were hired was so small that it simply wasn't worth interviewing those candidates. Plus, the quality of candidates who passed the assessment was at a level they’d never seen before.