'Man up' to bad recruitment
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Posted Thu 20 August 2009 @ 2:56 p.m. by Megan Lacy
Recruitment is one of the hardest things to get right. You can spend hours recruiting and have so many pieces of the puzzle - you can do assessment centres, three interviews, complete personality and competencies testing, and then do more screening and reference checks, and then finally call on all your wisdom and knowledge from the bottom of your gut and then you still get it so utterly wrong. You end up with low productivity, poor culture from new staff and unacceptable customer service.
One problem I had, was I would get a great run of wonderful staff and I would think I had the magic recipe, I got smug about ‘my way’ and then it happened, complacency crept in and slapped me in the face. Ouch, pride and ego is crushed and I wonder how wrong I could have got it again. I made the mistake of not evolving my way for the current time.
Currently we can blame the environment, as there is not the skill out there, and I believe that this has merit, but how much? I do believe it is different for each city. But I had an interesting email conversation with a contact centre manger who told me that maybe managers just need to ‘Man up’ and face that their recruitment process is crap. So don’t keep flogging the dead horse, and send recruitment to the experts and make them accountable for this important part of the contact centre.
It costs on average about $13k (callcentre.net benchmarking 2008) to replace a staff member including salaries, recruitment process, training and loss of productivity while you have low headcount. If centres don’t get recruitment right, the budget suffers, training and development suffers, the centre culture suffers and last, but not least, the customer suffers.
I have mulled on this theory and in these times, we have to get outside our comfort zone. When you look at what it can cause if you get it wrong, maybe it’s more sensible to send it to the experts at the start of the process?
But I'm going to sit on the fence and say, it's 'food for thought' and is worthy of a moment of contemplation. I guess the first step is still to ‘man up’ if it’s not working for you and do something different.
Now this thought leads onto the recruitment agencies: they need to be a class act, they must live and breathe the business and culture or you are back to square one.
Perhaps the next time an agency calls it just may be worth asking the question of the agency and get them to ‘Man up’ to your recruitment requirements.
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