How to: Recruiting Top Customer Service Agents

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Trusting your gut when hiring is like throwing darts at a board. Blindfolded.

Using unstructured hiring format can only explain 14 percent of an employee’s performance.

14_percent

Careerbuilder estimated that a single bad hire can cost your team $50,000 (besides their salary!) in lost productivity, morale, and logistic costs.

Zappos now offers new hires $2000 to leave after the first week of training.

How to recruit top customer service agents?

– understand the role you’re hiring for,
– create a great job description,
– optimize interviews,
– evaluate the ongoing process annually.

Understand the role

Einstein
To paraphrase Einstein: “If you’re searching for someone to climb a tree and HR is only giving you fish, you’re not going to get a great hire.”

Get answers to these questions to align your expectations:

• What will the new hire be expected to do? In 3 months? In a year?
• How will they be measured?
• What qualities will they need to fit in well with the team?
• What experience or background do we expect them to have?
• Who has been successful in this role before and why?
• Bring example resumes and talk through the pros and cons of specific candidates.

Create an Attractive Job Description

– present the vacancy and showcase your company’s personality.

zapier

Opening:

– provide the essentials: the position, location, and other essential information in a conversational tone.
– quick description: boil down the essence of the role.
– ideal candidate profile (Zapier “about you”)

The Job:
– be clear:
• use bullet points
automattic

Experience Needed:
– be inclusive – generally, top candidates with just one year experience are better than poor candidates with 10 years of experience.

Wrap It Up:
– give a bit more company background, put benefits and perks here.

Give It Personality:
– check this job description and get inspired.
Acuity Scheduling

Actively Recruit the Kind of Candidates You Want

A simple LinkedIn search can find local (or remote!) talent that fits the experience you’re looking for.
Finally, ask your high performers to refer good candidates and reward them for it.
linkedinsearch

Make the Interview Process Work For Both Parties

Good quality candidates move quickly. Don’t leave them in limbo for long! Job interviews are a two-way street. Sell the role and your company to candidates.

Evaluate the Hiring Process

– get process feedback from both successful and unsuccessful candidates: How did they find the job opening? Did it match their expectations?
– evaluate new hires: Are they the right fit?
– get metric savvy: What percent of applicants make it to an interview? What percent of interviewees make it to the offer? How many offers are turned down?

The Takeaway:

You get out what you put into it: relevant effort brings a great selection of candidates!

Read the full post here.

Katarína Kasalová
A Content Marketing Hippo working for Nicereply - customer satisfaction survey software. I focus on NPS, CSAT, and CES.

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