How to Find the Right Candidate for a Job: Challenges and Solutions

How do you find the right candidate for a job? Between labor shortages and the shrinking labor force, that’s the question most companies are asking right now. So what can you do to find the right people? First, let’s address the common shortcomings of some organizations’ hiring processes.

The Challenges of the Candidate Hunt

Some companies dread the hiring process. But there are valid reasons to worry about it, such as:

• Increased wage pressures. There is increasing pressure in the United States to raise wages for entry-level positions, so more money is on the line for each new hire. As such, employers want to be sure their new hires are worth the investment.
• Lack of objective selection skillset. Many employers and hiring managers rely too much on subjective factors when interviewing new candidates; their emotions drive their decisions. Many managers also aren’t taking advantage of objective measurements of candidate skills. For example, a BPO should test for English fluency and computer skills. If the focus is trained too much on subjective soft skills, hiring managers may decide on a candidate too early in the process.
• Interviews are time-consuming. It’s easy for hiring managers to feel interview burnout—seeing an endless number of candidates may force the manager to lose the energy and passion required to find the right person.
• Fragmented recruitment process. Sometimes not knowing how to find the right candidate for the job stems from not knowing how even to start. Most companies don’t have a non-stop recruiting process to sift through the thousands of applications they receive frequently. That means they must restart that recruitment system anytime they want to hire, leading to a lot of wasted time.

All of these roadblocks can be solved with a hiring process that prioritizes objective skill measurements and is run by people who know exactly what they are looking for. To give you an idea of what this looks like, let’s take a look at ClearSource BPO’s hiring process.

ClearSource’s Hiring Process

We hire our service agents with our clients in mind. That being said, we see the hiring process as a joint exercise with whichever client needs our services. 

Preparation

Before we even get to the hiring process, we work with the client to develop a comprehensive job description based on the client’s desires and our experience in the industry. This will at least include the experience level, skills, and educational requirements the client would like.

For example, this is the typical profile for our offshore program in the Philippines:

• 1+ years of customer service experience
• Completion of a 4-year college degree
• Sufficient score on a language proficiency test

Vetting/Selection Process

Once we have our job description and minimum qualifications established, we can go into the selection process. This is what it looks like:

1. The application is received.
2. The applicant takes assessments for English proficiency and computer skills.
3. The application is pre-screened.
4. If the application passes pre-screening, they are scheduled for a video interview.
5. A video interview is conducted and recorded.
6. The recording is sent to the operations manager for review.
7. The operations managers use the recording to pick who they would like to meet.
8. The final interview is conducted.
9. The operations manager communicates who they would like to hire to the recruiting team.
10. The recruiting team sends offers to candidates.

How Offshore Hires Negate Wage Pressures

As mentioned previously, wage pressures are increasing for entry-level positions in the U.S. We have not observed the same wage pressures in offshored countries like the Philippines, where call center jobs already offered higher wages than many other jobs. That’s why ClearSource promotes our offshore services for companies with smaller budgets so they can access the right job candidates.

Find Your Perfect Candidate

While we are very proud of our hiring process, we know it’s just one of many ways to approach candidate selection. But if you’re still figuring out how to find the right candidate, why not give our model a shot? Or, at least take the elements you like!

If you’re looking to improve the hiring process of your call center agents, we encourage you to consider what ClearSource has to offer. Contact us today to learn more about our outsourced customer service model.