Tips on Hiring Contact Center Associates in Today's Environment

00:00Tom Laird here. You've heard me break down contact center technology on the podcast time and time again. Now, it's time for me to help you with your challenges. As your contact center technology advisor through our new company, Expivia Digital, I can help you with things like CCaaS selection, any type of AI implementation, and nice studio and integration services. It's the same honest advice you hear on the geek applied specifically to your operation. Visit ExpiviaDigital.com to to get started, that's ExpiviaDigital.com. This is advice from a call center geek, a weekly podcast with a focus on all things call center. We'll cover it all from call center operations, hiring, culture, technology, and education. We're here to give you actionable items to improve the quality of yours and your customer's experience. This is an evolving industry with creative minds and ambitious people like this guy. Not only is his passion call center operations, but he's our host.

00:54He's the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing Group and the call center geek himself, Tom Laird. Welcome back everybody to another episode of Advice from a Call Center Geek, the call center and contact center podcast where we try to give you some actionable items, take back in your contact center, improve the overall agent experience, improve the agent quality, hopefully improve the customer experience as well. My name is Tom Laird. I am the CEO of Expivia Interaction Marketing. is a 500 to 600 seat call center outsourcer located here in summery beautiful Erie, Pennsylvania. How's everybody doing? I hope your summer's going well or at least the start of summer here. It's kind of official when it's the 4th of July. I'm recording this on the July 1st. So yeah, we're winding the week down and getting ready for the long weekend. Hey, a couple things that I wanted to talk to you today.

01:55So today's episode, I've heard so many, I guess, voices in pain asking me how we are getting call center associates to come to work, how we're hiring new associates, how are we onboarding, and kind of the, I don't know, the environment that we're in right now where there's so many jobs that are unfilled, a lot of people right now are not wanting to go back into the workforce, especially in the service sector, restaurants, the call call center aspect of this so I wanted to talk to you guys today about some of the things that we are doing. We have really not had a huge downturn in our hiring and I think that's you know it's probably the location that ran here in Erie Pennsylvania. There's a pretty good work ethic here. There's also you know it's a call center I don't want to say mecca but there's a pretty big skill set for it.

02:50So that's one of the things, but still, it has been a little bit more difficult. And I know for some of you it's been beyond difficult. So I want to give you some of our behind the scenes hiring, some of the things that we do that we found that have really worked, and hopefully this can help you as well. [QA coverage remark omitted] If you're kind of into what we're about to be doing, we have a YouTube channel that's ExpediaVR. We have a Facebook channel, a LinkedIn page that is basically just ExpediaVR, right? And again, we're trying to think through how can we leverage and kind of show people and teach people and also learn ourself about the uses of blockchain and NFTs and cryptocurrency and augmented reality and virtual reality.

03:47And how can we package that into the customer service center into customer support? It's not really been too well thought out. [QA coverage remark omitted] So literally customers wearing the Oculus glasses or whatever platform they're on walks into a virtual office, we'll actually sit down in desks and offices with our call center reps. And I guess it really wouldn't be call center reps, right? They'd be, I don't know, we probably gotta come up with a different name. And we help them the same way that we would. So if we wanna reset their password, if they have a delivery issue, the same way that I can help them over the phone, I can talk to them in virtual reality, over microphones, kind of the same exact way. So we're gonna show you all the behind the scenes, all the mistakes that we're gonna make, all the triumphs that we're hopefully gonna have.

04:50We also looks like Penn State Barren, which is Penn State's largest branch campus is located here in Erie. They're gonna jump on board and I think support us in some of the user experience aspects of this too. So really excited about that. So again, check that out if you're kind of into that. All right, let's talk about the meat and potatoes here hiring and some of the things that we do that we have found that really work. So let's first talk about social media, what works, what doesn't work. For us, the number one social network for hiring for us is Facebook. And I think a lot of people make mistakes or companies make mistakes that they just go on their Facebook page and they post a job organically, hopefully hope that works. So you got to put some money behind this and there's also job posts that you can do on your business account on Facebook.

05:47I highly suggest that because it will post it organically as well as a job post and second of all you can then throw money behind this thing and geolocate it to make sure that it's hitting the exact areas that you're looking for when you're looking for people. So what do we normally do? [pricing remark omitted] If we're really under the crunch, I might double that budget and I just watch it every single day or we watch it and our HR guys watch it and make sure that we're getting everything that we should be out of it. So leads will come in, you got to hop on them really fast. And I'm saying hopefully that day, at least and better yet, as soon as they come in, to call that rep to schedule an appointment.

06:38These things go stale really quick and I think that's another mistake that a lot of people make with Facebook is they just wait too long to get a hold of the person to schedule an interview. You're going to probably have about a 50% no-show rate, 40 to 50% no-show rate on these. So they're a little bit looser but I think you can get higher volumes and it makes up for it. For some of our programs, that's all we do is Facebook. So again, put some money behind it. Don't be cheap. Don't just post on your Facebook page and hope that the Facebook fairies just deliver your ads to people in need, but put some money behind it. Make sure you do it on a job post from your business site, and I think you can get some results. The other thing that we found to be really, really successful and super cheap is TikTok advertising.

07:24So you can advertise on TikTok for your job. I'm actually advertising right now the podcast, which has been pretty successful, because there's a demographic on there. That's something that we have found some success with, especially for programs that we are looking for some younger type associates. So that's something to check out. I would not post on LinkedIn for call center associates. For us, the only success we've really had on LinkedIn for hiring has really been higher up levels, management, C-level positions. That's where we find kind of the value in that. So again, if you're going to choose one, I think you're in Facebook and geolocate and target your audience, drill down to some of the things that there's an interest in and I think you can have some success with hiring. The other quick thing with this is make sure, because you will stand out I guarantee, that you put how much you're going to pay the reps in there.

08:20So even if you're, I don't want to say embarrassed, but if you think you're too low, put what you're going to pay them and try to put it as a salary for a year, right? [pricing remark omitted] That sounds a lot better. I think that there's a mental kind of aspect to it. So always kind of put the salary we have found and the actual kind of cost per hour. But post that. Right? I hate when people hide it because then that just kind of gives a weird feeling about the organization. You may disagree with that but just do a test sample and I guarantee you're going to have some better results. So staying with social media I guess but outside of the advertising. The other thing that we like to do is leverage the power of the group and leverage the power of our employees.

09:17Even if you have a smaller call center of 40 or 50 people and you need to hire 5, have all of those guys. First of all, make sure that they go and like and share all your posts, but then have them put that post out to all their network as well. That's a really easy way to really saturate a market and try to keep it as cost effective as you possibly can, especially if you're getting into the hundreds, 200, 300, 400 people in your organization. If they can all band together and do that, you're going to get a huge organic reach. going to allow you to schedule more people and there's going to allow you to hire more people as well. One of the other things that we do and have an extensive and we pay a lot of money out on it, but I think it's worth it, is a referral program, right?

10:06[pricing remark omitted] We have some people that, it's almost like a side hustle form, right? And they're bringing people in and if they work, it's a win-win for us and it's a win-win for our associates too and it's kind of an employee engagement thing as well. So think that through, especially if you like, and I always talk about this, especially if you like the culture of your center and you want to bring more of those types of people in. We say that you are the sum of the five closest people that you hang out with. So there's a good chance, if you like that person that's referring, someone like them or relatively close to what they are, personality-wise, is going to come in as well.

11:03If you hate the culture of your personality, then you've got to be careful on referrals because you don't want more of that coming in. [pricing remark omitted] In fact, we give everybody just referral cards to have, right, so if they're out at a party, they can just pull it out of their pocket like here and it has the phone number and our email address so that they can get ahold of us and know that we're gonna be calling. So I think that there's some cool things you can do from that, from a branding aspect as well. The other thing that we've done, especially if you are around colleges or any universities, is we've actually gone and asked if we could post flyers with our phone number cut at the bottom, like old school, right, and literally where the students could rip the phone number and call to try to schedule an appointment to get an interview.

12:07So that's something I think that has found, we've found some success with, especially around colleges. In Erie, we have three colleges literally in the city, and then one more about for us 20 miles away is FAR. For you guys, for most people, that's your commute. So I think that's another aspect. And then make sure that if you really need to get some people in the door, having an open house I think always works. It's a little bit more work. [pricing remark omitted] But to have the radio station come. Have some giveaways and some drawings. Have people be able to walk around, see the environment. Even if it's work from home, to get to kind of see the people. Have people right there to do interviews and hire on the spot.

13:01I think that's a really cool way to bring some people in, especially if you really, really need it. The last thing that we do all the time is we almost have an office in our Erie County unemployment office and make sure that you're leveraging the unemployed talent that's in your area by going down there, talking to those guys. Most of the time in the unemployment office is they'll let you set up a desk for a day or two and they can refer people over to you and then you can interview and hire them right on the spot and you know these are all people that are looking for jobs. So I think that that's another and make sure you have some really good you know relationships with the unemployment office and then to kind of ham an egg with that is you know the other types of social services organizations in your community. So you know for us if we're really looking for bilingual agents we can talk to the Multicultural Institute or any of those type of kind of places where there could be immigrants, there could be other people that are looking for jobs and they probably have a skill set that you need especially if you're getting specific with certain things that they can come and they can help.

14:19We found some just amazing, amazing employees that way. One thing we do not do is we don't hire temps. We have found that to be nothing but a headache. I know there are very few call center managers out there that are listening to this, have had good experiences with temps. We find that we want these guys to be our employees. We want them to learn our culture. We wanna really have control over who we're hiring. And it always turned into kind of a headache for us. So I hope that that's helpful. At least if there's one thing in there that maybe you're not doing now that you could try, All this stuff kind of works for us, and I think you need an overall plan now, right? You can't just be like, hey, we're gonna post on Facebook and hope for the best. There needs to be a recruiting plan for your organization to bring in people now, especially in the environment that we're in, with people not really wanting to work, having a difficulty coming back into the workforce.

15:16I think if you can do some of those things, I think you can really advance the hiring in your organization. So again, I hope that that's helpful. I hope you guys all have a great 4th of July, and I'll talk to you next week.