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February 27, 2007

Notes from Call Center Demo in Miami

We just returned from Call Center Demo in Miami.  The show is sponsored by the same group that publishes Call Center Magazine.

A few general observations:

  • The show mirrored the overall industry segmentation.  About 75% of the visitors to our booth represented centers under 150 seats.  According the Contact Babel, the UK research firm, 80% of North American centers have less than 200 seats. 
  • Those centers with less than 150 seats were represented by senior managers and executives versus the larger centers tended to be represented by mid level managers.
  • For the first time, we heard from an outsourcing group that represents off shore capacity that the home agent model in the US is competing with them for deals.  While we work with both off shore centers and home agent centers, this was very interesting to hear. 
  • A few main themes continue for hiring front line representatives in contact centers:
    • Recruiting continues to be a major challenge in many markets
    • Turnover continues to plague most mid size to larger contact center organizations
    • The traditional hiring approach of resume and interview doesn't cut it anymore.  Contact centers striving to best in class are pushing a more predictive approach in order to drive better new hire job performance.

Posted by jeff at 08:22 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 22, 2007

Call Center Demo in Miami

We're attending the Call Center Demo show in Miami from February 21st - February 23rd.  This show incorporates content from ICMI's consulting unit.  We'll report back from the floor later.

Posted by jeff at 06:40 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 15, 2007

Mirror, Mirror ...What is the best recruiting source of all?

My two year old daughter loves Snow White.  With the challenges facing hiring managers today, a magic mirror that answers our questions would be helpful.  But, as the wicked Queen discovers, we may not always like the answers.


So, what is the best recruiting source of all?  Last year, a study sponsored by the Direct Employer’s Association and conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton reviewed recruiting trends.  In this study, they introduced a nifty Source Value Index concept that compares recruiting sources using the following formula:


(% of New Hires from Source) / (% of Recruitment Budget Allocation)

We pushed this one step forward to add a quality of hire component to the formula.  Our clients use our testing platform to qualify job candidates for front line agent positions in contact centers.  Not only do we capture testing scores by candidate, but we also capture recruiting source, job tenure, and job performance data downstream in the employee's lifecycle.  Our goal is to create and end to end hiring optimization model that links sourcing strategy to job candidate qualification to job performance output.  In order to reduce hiring risk, just knowing how much was spent to hire someone compared by source is not enough.  We need to understand the quality of that hire.


So, using the same methodology, we added factors for tenure and job performance.  We aggregated data across several clients to create our own Source Value Index.  We also divided recruiting sources into tiers to make it easier to analyze.  Tier 1 is for traditional recruiting sources like print ads.  Tier 2 is for internet related sourcing.  Tier 3 is for person to person sources like an employee referral.  Keep in mind that we are focused exclusively on call center hiring for hourly job positions in the $9 to $14 per hour range.

In our chart below, a higher ranking is better.  The position (1:1) represents an equilibrium point.  OUr results are similar to the Booz Allen study except that we see a larger gap between Tier 3 sources (person to person referrals primarily) and Tier 1 sources because of the added performance component.  Efficiency refers to the dollars spent versus quantity of hires received. Effectiveness refers to the quality of hire


A few comments about recruiting sources - In our case, referrals are traditional person to person referrals, not the H3 or Jobster variety.  Not very many of our clients use the web based referral model that is the rage in the HR space.  We're not sure in the hourly market if this model has the same punch as it may for professional, salaried positions.  We hope to update our model with data from web based referrals later this year.


As the Booz Allen study showed and ours supports, solid data analysis linking recruiting sources to expenditures and quality of hire can lay the foundation of a data driven recruiting model.  Perhaps we won’t need that magic Mirror after all.

Posted by jeff at 05:11 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

February 02, 2007

Home Agent Hiring

We're strong supporters of the home agent concept.  We've been supporting home agent hiring since 2002.  We're pleased to announce our new hiring platform designed to help select the right candidate for the home agent position. 

According to IDC, a research and analysis firm, about 100,000 home agents exist in the United States today.  That number is expected to grow to 300,000 by 2010.  Our belief is that we will see faster growth in this market.  The economics are just too appealing.  In fact, in our own Recruiting Center, we're preparing to move to a home agent model to support the phone evaluation of call center job candidates we provide to our clients.

One of the driving factors that we see in the home agent market is the ability to increase your labor pool.  In our site selection studies to support opening a new call center, we consistently find that job candidates want to be within 30 minutes of the physical call center.  Based on this data, the labor market is now limited in size and the quality of the job candidates that live within that market.  The home agent market allows you to throw that constraint out the window.

Michelle Cline from our company recently presented on home agent hiring at Call Center 2.0.  She was joined on the panel by representatives from 1 800 Flowers and Alpine Access.  Feel free to review her presentation here.

You can also learn more about working from home in the Telcoa TeleWork Benchmarking Report.

 

Posted by jeff at 12:57 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Go Bears!!

We're based in the great city of Chicago.  I was a Senior in high school when the 85/86 Chicago Bears destroyed New England in the Super Bowl.  As a lifelong Bears fan this was the ultimate Chicago sports experience until the Chicago Bulls championship runs in the 1990's.  And, who can forget the classic Super Bowl Shuffle.

Hope springs eternal in Chicago (I'm a Cubs fan too), but here is why the Bears will win on Sunday:

1.  18 of the last 22 Super Bowls were won by the team coming into the game that allowed fewer regular season points.  The Bears allowed 255 points.  The Colts 360.

2.  The Bears offense scored the same number of points as the Colts offense in the regular season - 427 points.

3.  Grossman isn't that bad.  In fact his yards per attempt is 6.66 versus Manning's 6.84.

4.  Finally, nobody thinks the Bears will win and in Chicago we welcome the underdog role.

 

Posted by jeff at 09:40 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)