Your call center agents are the face and voice of your brand. It is very important that you put a lot of thought and effort into recruiting these agents. At all times, it’s important to have competent and trustworthy call center agents on hand. And just as you try to deliver the best experience to your customers, you should put the same amount of effort into delivering a quality experience to your call center agent job candidates. Here are some effective sourcing strategies for call center agents:
1) Build a talent pipeline
To ensure your customers don’t have to go without quality customer service, it’s important to always have candidates to pick from. This means you must have a pipeline of passive candidates in the sidelines that may not be currently looking for work. You should be staying in touch with these candidates on a regular basis, slowly building their interest for your company. Using LinkedIn to find passive candidates is one of the great sourcing strategies for call center agents.
2) Take advantage of social media
A great way to stay in touch with passive candidates as well as active job seekers is through social media. One of the excellent sourcing strategies for call center agents is to post job openings as well as other company content on various social media channels. This can include employee testimonials, company news, industry news, and information that explains what your company culture is like and how you are unique. Maybe you play games on Friday afternoons, or hold contests for who can get the highest number of customer issues resolved. Whatever makes you stand out, make sure you highlight it. Use both your company social media pages as well as your own and get your employees to do the same. Also, as mentioned above search through yours and your employees social media networks for prospective candidates.
3) Take advantage of technology
One of the sourcing strategies for call center agents that allows you to get candidates hired more quickly is video interviewing. Technology has come very far with this, and there are plenty of cloud-based software solutions out there, including ones that can do the interview for you. These solutions interview the candidate right after they send in their application and record their responses to questions you want asked. This cuts down the amount of unnecessary in-person interviews for recruiters.
Artificial intelligence can do facial and speech recognition in interviews to analyze a person’s body language as well. AI can also tell whether a person is cheating in a video interview by using another person’s voice to answer questions. Many recruiters also prefer this because it reduces bias, since it ignores other factors such as race, gender or what college a candidate attended. Some of the best video interviewing software solutions out there include SparkHire, VidRecruiter and BreezyHR.
4) Hold and Attend the Right Events
To find the right candidates, another one of the sourcing strategies for call center agents is to venture to and hold events to meet them in-person. This is especially important because personality is everything and call center agents are the voice and face of your company. Hold job fairs at colleges and involve employees. Have them express to candidates what it’s like working for your company, and what they like most about your company culture. If you have any employees that are alma maters to a school, they are excellent to use since candidates can relate to them more. And when you attend events, go beyond simply just job fairs. Find passive candidates at events for professionals, such as freelancing events or public speaking seminars.
Remember, when evaluating call center candidates, experience is important. But personality is even more important. Use the above sourcing strategies for call center agents, and be sure to evaluate soft skills such as emotional intelligence, perseverance and adaptability since these are harder to teach.
Author: Jessica Cody
Jessica Cody, a native of Fairfield County, Connecticut, has a background in online marketing and public relations. Currently, she works at VHMNetwork LLC in the role of Marketing Analyst. She is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, where she studied Journalism and Political Science. She is also an avid runner with a passion for the outdoors.
