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Recruiting Telephone Staff
Very often, your customers will make instant judgements about your company based on one short conversation with one individual. It is vital that all Telephone Users are giving a professional and positive image of the organisation.
Training can obviously help team members to hone their skills, but they also have to possess the right personality and the right attitude towards the company and the customer. Training cannot be effective if someone does not want to improve themselves. Therefore, it is essential that we take time to select the right people for the job. This Adobe Acrobat document will help.
Recruitment mistakes can be very costly and time consuming - many managers fall into the trap of simply choosing the best applicant out of the current batch of C.V's. Whilst this may fulfill a short term need, the long term effects of Bad Recruitment Decisions (BRD's) can be devastating for the team, department, company and customers.
Many BRD's are made because of subjective, rather than objective, decision making. Personality is a vitally important aspect of communication but it has to be assessed on balance, together with many other factors.
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When recruiting Telephone Staff we need to consider the Person Profile and the Job Profile. Psychometric testing can be helpful but should always be used in conjunction with your own assessment procedure, never relied on completely to make recruitment decisions. How do we attract the right people? One of the most common complaints these days is that employers cannot find Telemarketers, Telephone Salespeople or good Customer Care staff. It is true that when the market is buoyant, there are plenty of people looking around but when it is not, people tend to crave security and resist changing jobs. It has always been difficult to find Telemarketers who are willing to work 8 |
A Telemarketing Manager in a publishing company recalls her most memorable BRD: We were pretty desperate for staff and had 2 vacant territories in the internal sales team. None of the applicants were ideal but one of them seemed okay so I took a chance, despite my intuition that something was not quite right. He was unreliable right from the outset, turning up late but always with a plausible excuse. He looked very angelic and got on well with the rest of the team. After a few weeks, his contract was terminated for continued and unexplained absences from work. After he left the company it was discovered that he was a drug addict who was on probation for actual bodily harm. It took me a while to live that one down with the management team. |
hours a day, 5 days a week making hundreds of telephone calls to promote your product. No matter how dedicated the Telemarketer, they inevitably become discouraged, de-motivated and less productive as time goes by.
Many employers have unrealistic expectations of Telemarketing. At best, it can be motivating, exciting, rewarding and financially beneficial to the individual. At worst it can be boring and soul destroying.
In order to attract the right people we need to make the job, environment and rewards attractive!
WHERE TO LOOK
There are some obvious recruitment avenues to go down such as newspaper advertisements and agencies. They can be effective if used in the right way but costly if not thought out properly first.
Using newspapers
Remember that if you are using a newspaper to advertise, you need to attract the attention of right applicants very quickly in a competitive marketplace. Remember that your initial advertisement should be designed to 'sell' your company and job to prospective applicants. They will probably be comparing you with other organisations so be sure to include any points that set you apart from the competition.
Using Job Agencies
When using an agency it is vital that you give them a clear brief beforehand. They will need to know the type of person you are looking for including personality, skills, knowledge, experience and qualifications. It is advisable to ask the agency to inform prospective applicants that you will be conducting telephone interviews as the first stage of the selection process. This enables you to assess many factors that simply do not come across on paper.
TESTING TELEPHONE SKILLS
The only contact your people have with customers is over the telephone. Therefore, their telephone skills are initially the most important consideration when recruiting. It is amazing how many companies ask for written applications from people who are applying for a role to speak to their customers on the phone.
The most effective way of testing telephone skills is to use a Telephone Interview for all applicants.
If you are recruiting Telephone Salespeople, it stands to reason that if an individual can 'sell' themselves convincingly over the telephone to prospective employers, they may also have the right attitude and skills to sell your products.
Detailed information to discuss at interview stage may be obtained from an application form or CV, but you can glean an awful lot more about an applicant's personality from a short telephone conversation.
BENEFITS OF TELEPHONE INTERVIEWS
Saves
management time interviewing unsuitable applicants
Emulates
the Caller / Call taker situation, giving the interviewer an accurate
impression of the call from the customer's viewpoint.
Allows
applicant to ask questions prior to formal interview
Tests
applicant's ability to react under pressure
Ensures
that only the best quality of applicant progresses to interview stage
CONDUCTING TELEPHONE INTERVIEWS
Telephone interviews should last between 5 and 10 minutes, during which time a decision is made as to whether the applicant should go through to the next stage of recruitment, i.e. formal interview. You have several options for dealing with unsuccessful applicants:
Send
unsuccessful applicants a letter of rejection following the telephone
interview
Tell
applicants at the outset of the call that you will only be letting them
know if they have been successful, i.e. if they do not hear from you,
they were unsuccessful.
Tell
them at the end of the call that they have been unsuccessful
GUIDELINES FOR SUCCESSFUL TELEPHONE INTERVIEWING
What we are trying to assess in the informal telephone interview is the applicant's conversational style. Help the candidate by asking open-ended questions but observe how they handle pauses, for example.
We are judging the applicant on their voice tone, manner, ability to handle and clarify questions, ability to 'think on their feet', their listening skills and overall manner. The chances are that if we like them, so will our customers.
It may seem harsh to reject an applicant based on a short telephone conversation but remember that your customers form an impression of your business very quickly and this is often based on a telephone call to one individual. We need people who are able to project the right image very quickly, from the very start of the call.
INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
The best way of formulating interview questions is to take 5 or 6 of the key qualities and skills that are necessary for the job, then create a set of questions that will test the applicant's suitability in those areas. For example, if the applicant regularly plays team sports and engages in team activities outside work, it is likely that they will favour working in a team rather than as an individual. The question 'What activities do you get involved in outside work?' will usually give us some useful information about teamwork.
QUESTIONING TECHNIQUES
The aims of asking questions during interview are:
To get the candidate to talk about themselves thereby ascertaining their suitability for the position
To maintain control of the interview
To identify a 'match' between the person and the company / job / department
The effectiveness of the interview is largely dependent on the skill of the interviewer to ask the right questions. If you do not ask the right questions, you will not get the right information. Take into account voice tone, wording and style when asking questions. The right question asked in the wrong tone of voice is unlikely to encourage an honest and open response.
Many interviewers are afraid to ask direct questions. Do not be afraid of asking what you need to know - the interviewee expects to be out 'on the spot' so it is not an invasion of privacy provided that your questions are kept within the realms of legality.
General guidelines for questioning techniques
Ask one question at a time. People get very confused if several questions are fired at once
Try to achieve a balance between asking too many questions and too few. Think about the information you need to gather before you formulate your questions, otherwise you will be simply asking questions without really understanding the reasons behind them.
Listen carefully to the answers to your questions. Information that is omitted can be just as telling as information given.
The interviewer should check his understanding of the interviewee's answers by repeating the statement in his own words.
There are several ways of gaining information from the interviewee:
Open ended questions
Open ended questions start with what - where - when
- how - who - why.
The interviewee is encouraged to give a response other than 'yes / no'
to an open ended question. However, you may still get one-word answers.
For example, if you ask the interviewee: 'What sort of environment suits
you best?' The interviewee may answer: 'Stimulating'.
Closed questions
Closed questions lead to a yes / no response and
as such they are useful for confirming information or shortening the conversation.
Closed questions begin with words such as: do - have - will - can - is
…
'Do you have any management experience?'
Probing questions
Where more information is needed, the interviewer
needs to ask probing questions:
'Tell me more about your responsibilities as team leader'
Hypothetical questions
During the interview, it is often useful to place the interviewee in a hypothetical situation and test their reaction. Hypothetical questions begin with Imagine that / Supposing that / What would you do if…
QUESTIONS TO AVOID
Leading questions
A leading question is a question that leads the interviewee into giving a response, by implying the desired answer within the question itself. It is of limited use to ask the interviewee 'So, I guess you really like working in a team, don't you?'. It is obvious that the answer to this question should be 'yes'.
50 / 50 questions
50 /50 questions are questions to which two possible answers are supplied by the interviewer. All the interviewee has to do is choose which answer he wishes to give. This takes little or no skill and simply relies on good guesswork.
Personal Questions
It is not acceptable to ask about the applicant's personal situation such as sexual orientation, religious or racial principles or marital circumstances. You may not ask if the applicant intends to have children or ask for any financial information such as their mortgage or other outstanding loans.
KEEPING CONTROL OF THE INTERVIEW
There are several reasons why an interview may go 'off track':
The
applicant may be nervous and talk too much
The
applicant may be really enthusiastic and keen to make a good impression
by being verbal and communicative
The
applicant may not be able to answer your questions and tries to steer
the conversation in a direction he feels more comfortable with
The interviewer needs to control the situation so that the interview remains structured. Questions are the best way to introduce (or re-introduce) a particular subject.
OTHER WAYS TO TEST SUITABILITY
Apart from interview questions, you may wish to set the applicant a task such as gathering information about your competitors and presenting it back during the interview. (Give them approximately one week to complete this, before interview)
Numeracy and literacy tests can also be used to assess suitability for specific jobs, as can typing / keyboard skills tests
You may wish to ask the applicant to take part in a role-play, to assess their sales skills but do make sure you put them at ease and make them feel as comfortable as possible. Role-play has been known to instil fear into the hearts of grown men!
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Role-play needs to be properly thought out and well structured for it to work well in interview situations. Finally, here's a thought for those companies who successfully recruit Telephone Salespeople, Customer Care staff and Telemarketers… but only to find that they leave soon afterwards. As part of the interview process, take the applicant into the department and let them sit and listen to some calls being made by the team. No matter what you tell them in the interview about what the job will be like, this is reality. Let them spend about 30 minutes chatting to the people doing the job (they'll tell them the harsh truths that don't get put into the advert) and |
Here is a true story of a woman going for an interview for a sales job. Sales Manager (Interviewer): Okay then, I'd like you to show me that you can sell. Sell me this ashtray (pushes ashtray across the desk) Interviewee: In order to do that, I'd need some more information. How much would you say it's worth? Sales Manager: Oh, I don't know - about a fiver. Interviewee: A fiver - it's yours! (Pushes it towards him across the desk.) |
then ask them afterwards for their feedback. It may be necessary to brief the team beforehand just to make sure that they are their usual positive selves!
At this early stage, you may get people dropping out of the process because they have discovered that the job was not what they had envisaged. It is far better for this to happen now than when you have already employed them. You will also be ensuring that the people accepting the position are fully aware of the type of calls they will be required to handle and therefore in the best position to start the job with a positive and receptive attitude.
Learning Curve, Reading, Berkshire, England Phone 0118 9875683
