SACS at Work

Sparking a Hiring Revolution for a Wireless Giant

For wireless communications companies, call centers are more than key departments. They're competitive lifelines. The agents working in them directly influence both customer satisfaction and bottom line performance.

In May 2003, one of Canada's leading wireless enterprises turned to Select International to help transform its recruiting, employment screening and hiring practices across all four of its call centers. The goal: reduce employee turnover and absenteeism rates while increasing productivity and efficiency.

To meet these objectives, Select customized a proven approach to hiring that used SACS call center software as the anchor. Select's experts first created "Success Profiles" for each call center job - clear benchmarks against which all future hiring decisions could be made. Then Select attached a pre employment screening element to the existing application tracking system to quickly and accurately identify the best candidates. No longer swamped with applicants, recruiters were able to spend quality time conducting first interviews to identify candidates to proceed to the next phase.

By adding SACS as the next step in the hiring funnel, Select enabled the wireless company to measure how each call center candidate ranked against the attributes deemed crucial for the specific environment - and accurately predict how well the candidates would perform. For the final piece of the puzzle, Select trained key call center management personnel on how to get the most from SACS results.

Exceeding Expectations

Within the first year of implementing the call center software, the client surpassed its initial goals for employee turnover and recovered the costs associated with the project. Results included:

• Reducing employee turnover by 50% (to a 13% total) in the first year of employment
• Reducing absenteeism by 48%
• Hiring better-qualified agents for various positions within the four call centers
• Receiving positive feedback on training returns
• Increasing recruitment efficiencies and reducing costs within eight months

According to the company's sourcing specialist, one of the key reasons they chose Select to help pursue these goals was because SACS was "by far the most comprehensive, validated and flexible" tool they examined and "very simple and easy to administer."

A team leader in Operations documented a telling change as a result of SACS and the holistic hiring solution:

"I used to spend 85% of my time on hiring and recruitment issues. Since implementing the Select International approach, I average two interviews for every agent I hire. I am now only spending 25% of my time on this aspect, which allows me to focus on my primary role - operations. "

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