Every contact center in the Philippines needs quality assurance not just for employee performance, but also for separating excellent hires from unqualified candidates. For recruiters to execute this role fully, they need to apply customer service principles in their hiring practice.
Successful call centers bank on their human resource (HR) department because they know how important the HR’s role is in hiring competent individuals who can serve as company assets and drive the business to success.

Given that recruitment and employee retention are big challenges in the call center trade, the need to make recruiters customer-oriented has gained greater emphasis as well. In other words, call center recruiters must also have good customer service skills in order to attract excellent customer service representatives (CSR).

Why it makes sense

Recruiters don t interact with customers, so why do they have to be customer-centric? It’s because recruitment itself is a customer service function: HR personnel and recruiters are the most important point of contact between the company and prospecting hires. They are frontline employees like CSRs. Their attitude and performance can determine whether they can supply the company with job jumpers or future industry leaders. That’s pretty much how customer service agents work, right? The only difference is that CSRs take care of actual buyers in place of job applicants.

Jobseekers are essentially customers

Applicants approach companies with hopes of landing a position inside the organization. When you look at it on the surface, they’re the ones who need something from the company, unlike customers who fuel the profit inflow. But the truth is that they should be given topnotch customer service too.
As we’ve pointed out above, these jobseekers are actually important for expanding call centers with many vacancies to fill immediately. And since outsourcing is a booming business, candidates can easily move on to the next choice, or worse, discourage others from applying because of the neglect they felt during the recruitment process. In customer service, this can be as detrimental as customer attrition due to negative word-of-mouth marketing.

Applying customer service principles in recruitment

What do customers hate most when transacting with a call center agent? The top peeves that always come to mind first are being put on hold, getting transferred multiple times, and getting no responses. These are the same concerns that drive possibly brilliant applicants away and earn the company a bad rep.
Sadly, these mistakes are also common in busy HR offices with a long list of candidates to entertain. They sometimes fail to update application statuses while prioritizing seemingly bigger hires. Still, it should be common practice to let a jobseeker know if he is still considered for the position, if he didn’t make the cut, or if there’s an estimate as to how long he should wait for a definite answer.

This means active communication from the recruiters’ end and providing aspirants with enough resources containing the company’s hiring process and contact channels. Of course, the interview process itself should exude customer service attitude and apply customer-centric practices so that the recruiters could tell early on who has great promise in fitting in the workplace. What should recruiters do to make the big catch? Find out in the second part of this article where we’ll share interview questions that good call center agents must be able to ace.