Domestic BPO Recruitment Best Practices

A Brief Note                                      

Recruitment basically means providing Man Power Requirements to the Clients according to their needs or we can say that recruitment is the process of attracting candidates and selecting among them who best suits your needs. Since the demand from the clients is increasing day by day, it was necessary to realign & implement few practises to improve the recruitment efficiency 

On a practical study, our findings on the recruitment are as follows:

Walk-in’s vs selection Trend: 

          On a sample 3 month study on the domestic recruitment, the candidate rejection %age was around 61% from the various recruitment sources.

Since the rejection %age shot sky high, it was very necessary to bring in an innovative method to increase selection %age from the existing walk-in candidate pool.

On further analysis of the rejected candidates, below are the findings:

The top reason under rejected candidates was contributed by “Salary Concerns – 40%” which had low scope to work upon.
The least contributor “Others - 25%” had various reasons for rejections:

• Candidates looking for Non-voice process
• Candidates wanted Night shift jobs
• Candidates were highly qualified 

which again had very less scope to work upon.


There were about 35% of candidates who were rejected in the HR/ Operations round for basic reasons as listed below:

• Lack of Communication
• Grammatical errors
• Lack of presentation skills
• Not expressive due to Interview fear

The above categorized candidates are workable, hence we have designed this new module for improving the selection %.
The target audience from the rejected list who falls under “Communication” have been counselled by HR professionals to join a training program designed exclusively.

The exclusive training program has been designed for 6 days wherein we cover, 

• Grammar
• Sentence formation 
• English communication (expressing ideas/ views)
• Convincing skills in English
• Interview skills
• Soft skills
• Telephone etiquette
• Role plays 
• Playing Motivational videos

Post 6 days of training, the candidates undergo a certification program on the topics covered.
These certified candidates will be presented further for OPS interview.

Result:                                                                                         

• The above practice helped us to increase our monthly selection by 14%-18%.

Additional Benefits:                                                                     

• This best practice also proved that the employees association with our organisation is beyond 6 months.

BEST PRACTICE – PIP (PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT PLAN)

A Brief Note on PIP                                                           

A Performance Improvement Plan is a formal process used by operations/ HR team to help employees improve overall performance or behavior. The performance improvement plan is to identify performance, Call Quality or behavioral issues that need to be corrected and creates a written plan of action to guide the improvement or corrective action.

Call Quality:                                                                                                                                                                 

• Employees would be evaluated on defined Call Quality parameters which includes Script, Soft skills, Product & Process knowledge.
• Once the parameter is defined asper process, it has to be divided by 100 so that each parameter gets a value.  Further each parameter can be broken in Fatal & Non-Fatal Parameter.
• Fatal Parameter would be termed if there is a monitory impact or good will to the organization and effect customer satisfaction.
• Non-Fatal Parameter would be termed if the impact is related to soft skills
• Fatal instance would rate the call to “0” whereas Non-fatal instance would lead to reduction in the scores. Non-Fatal parameter score to given individual weightage which sums to 100
• The Call Quality scores are segregated by Green =>95%, Yellow B/w 90%-94% & Red band <=89%
• We monitor 4 calls per agent per week with quality feedbacks

Performance:                                                                                                                                                

• Employee would be assigned with an individual target basis the process targets
• Differential targets assigned based on vintage

Behavior:                                                                                     

Employee behavior considered basis acceptance on the Organization culture, procedure, and policies and will issues.

Criteria to select Employees for PIP:                                                            

• An employee who consistently falls under red band for 2 months
• An employee who scores more than 50% Fatal calls in a month
• An employee who does not achieve the set operational performance target for 2 months
• Weekly performance is less than 25%

On a sample study, the performance trend of an agent is as follows: 

Criteria:

• Employee who scored more than 50% fatal calls in “X” month & their performance for previous week was 52%.

PIP Process:

PIP Letter has to be issued:

• Met the outlier’s one on one & signing of PIP forms.
• Briefing on the PIP reason & plan to improve
• Clear communication on non-improvement post PIP, action will be taken on individuals by the management

Monitoring:

• Daily call audit and feedback has to be provided in specified format
• Live barge to check the implementation of feedbacks shared
• Instant feedback with suggestion on improvements to be shared along with focus points
• Performance metric to be discussed by supervisors on regular intervals
• QA/OPS team to have daily briefing on the performance improvements
• Combined Performance review on weekly basis by quality & Operations Manager

Conclusion:

• On 30th day a combined report on Quality & Performance will be flashed with the acceptance status of the employee
• PIP form to be relooked in the presence of RM’s & the final status was shared (Certified moved back to operations & the non-certified was issued a termination letter.

Result:

• With the help of above best practice we were able to certify 73% of the employee who were under PIP.

Additional Benefits:                                                                     

• This best practise also helped employees to gain higher monitory benefits (Performance Incentives) as there was substantial increase in their performance.
• This best practise showed improvement trend in E-sat & C-sat