When it comes to hiring nearshore agents, Callzilla has enjoyed some great successes and some equally hideous experiences.
We would love to say that we always make the right hiring decision, but we don’t. Nobody does. Jack Welch famously said that when he started he hired the wrong person about 70% of the time. (These days, he only hires the wrong person about 50% of the time.)
The team at Callzilla has had some great successes and some hideous experiences. It’s easy to misperceive a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. That’s why it’s so important to have a good onboarding process, and to keep measuring performance afterwards.
Sometimes a candidate who gave a great interview ends up stumbling through the onboarding process. That same person might shine once they’ve settled in. Or vice versa. We concentrate on providing agents at our nearshore call center with the right tools, the right knowledge and the right coaching to do their jobs well. It increases our batting average.
It’s easy to misperceive a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
We have a culture that is very metric-focused: the QA score, the cancel-save rate, the rate of converting calls into orders, or resolving problems. The team knows there is accountability, and there are incentives if they hit the metrics they are asked to. In order to prepare our nearshore agents for these expectations, we have to do a lot of coaching. We also have to push back against vague answers, because we don’t want anything to fall through the cracks.
Hiring is never a stand-alone process. It’s only the first in a series of processes that helps us find the right people and help those people perform well. Our growth and success as a company shows that we’re getting better and better at it.
About the Author: Neal Topf
