Predictive recruiting for Customer Service

Background

This Nordic-based publicly listed company was building a new customer service team and were struggling to find good customer service candidates that matched the company values. The company wanted to implement a new kind of recruitment model that would be based on data in order to solve their challenges in employee turnover and commitment.

Aims

The company wanted to better understand what traits correlate with good job performance in their Customer Service roles.

The goal was to build a data-driven, predictive and unbiased recruitment process to deliver substantial cost savings, by reducing employee turnover and increasing engagement.

Some of the key aims for the project were:

• Identify candidates who are best suited to working in a Customer Service role.
• Use psychometric data to improve recruitment in Customer Service and reduce both recruitment costs and staff attrition rates.
• Incorporate cognitive ability tests as well as personality assessments, using bespoke personality scales that are built to match the company values and correlate with other success factors.
• To use psychometric assessments from the start of their recruitment process.

Our Approach

1. In-depth scoping and role research by Psycruit's Occupational Psychologists.
2. We then worked with the client to help define their performance metrics.
3. Current staff members were then asked to complete an assessment.
4. We analysed and combined the assessment results with actual job performance based on KPIs to build the ideal profile for Customer Service for this particular company.
   
   

The Results

By using the created ideal profile when recruiting for new employees to Customer Service, the company witnessed some major improvements.

Results and key findings of the project included:

• So far 40 new colleagues have been hired using the new predictive recruitment model.
• 90% of the new recruits exceeded company defined KPIs within first two weeks.
• Employee turnover decreased from 31% to 7,9%.
• Cost savings within first 6 months ca. £ 230,000
• Qualitative feedback from the line managers was very positive. Managers reported excellent cultural fit and high levels of engagement among the new recruits.
• Strong correlation between verbal ability test results and job performance.
• Correlation between personality assessment results and job performance. We found strong correlation between 13 traits and company defined KPIs.
• At completion of assessments all candidates received an automated feedback report based on their results.