How to Attract Talented Agents

Amanda Davies explains what you should be doing to attract the very best agents to your contact centre.

1. Advertise the benefits of working for you

With the job market recovering, applicants can now afford the luxury of asking “why should I work for you?” – and you need to have an answer!

Making an effort to sell the benefits of your business – at both the application and interview stages – can be the difference between hiring the best talent in the area and losing to your competitor.

These factors are especially influential in major cities and contact-centre-heavy areas such as South Wales and Bristol, where there is a higher concentration of contact centres.

So if you have a new restaurant, offer great health benefits, have solid career development plans or guarantee a car parking space for every employee… shout about it! After all, why should someone work for you when they could have a better experience in the building opposite?

2. A mobile-responsive website can help get your job seen

68% of 18–25-year-olds now use their mobile phones when searching for a job – and expect to be able to complete an application on the move.

If your business has yet to create a mobile-responsive website, your candidates are likely to find the application process clunky and give up (that is, if they find your vacancy at all).

3. Show your applicants what it is like to work for you – with a video

Don’t expect candidates to trawl through pages of literature on your website to find out more about your company. Instead, embed a video on your website showing them what it is like to work for you.

This video could include agent success stories, footage from awards evenings and company events, or even a virtual tour of your contact centre.

Whatever you choose, the video should capture the positive energy in your contact centre and help your candidates to visualise what it would be like to work for you.

4. Don’t overcomplicate your application process

Overcomplicating your application process with lengthy forms and too many skills-based tests can push your candidates to look elsewhere – especially if your main competitor is running a comparably simpler process.

Making things simpler will likely increase the number of candidates who complete the application process – giving you a far wider talent pool to choose from.

This same logic can be applied to the assessment process. While candidates expect skills-based testing, and this helps you get the measure of the applicants, these tests should be appropriate to the advertised job role and shouldn’t be a barrier to people with less experience.

5. Travel the candidate journey yourself

The only way to really understand the candidate experience – and see where you’re going wrong – is to travel the journey yourself.

• Start on your home page and see how easy it is to find your ‘careers’ section.
• Complete your application process in full – including all of your work history (not forgetting specific dates) and the ‘why do you want to work here?’ questions – to see how long it really takes.
• Take your skills-based test – and see if you pass it!

Armed with first-hand experience, you should be able to identify the weaker points in your process and takes steps to change them.

6. Leave a positive impression on your candidates

Today, negative publicity is only a tweet away – so it is important that you leave a positive impression on your candidates (even if they are unsuccessful).

If word spreads that your recruitment process is incredibly difficult, or that your interview team was unnecessarily rude, you could see a dip in the number of people applying – and that’s not going to help at all!

With thanks to Amanda Davies at ISV Software