Video interviewing for contact centre recruitment

Volume recruitment for contact centres can be one of the most stressful, time sensitive – yet often thrilling – type of recruitment going. It takes a certain kind of recruiter to do the role successfully before burning out. Yet if you speak to any high volume contact centre recruiter who has been doing the job for years, they usually wouldn’t change it for the world!

High volume, fast paced recruitment

We speak to contact centre recruitment teams often and the same pain points usually come up. They need to get a high volume of heads through, in a short period of time – often in cities where there are other contact centres running recruitment campaigns. This essentially means that the same people are applying for the same roles at the same time.

One of the main frustrations can be when an assessment day is set up; you have your recruitment team all set up, usually having to work over weekends. They turn up, bracing themselves for a flurry of chosen candidates ready for first stage interviews and a series of assessment questions. Everyone is ready and waiting and then the first planned candidate doesn’t show. In fact possibly 1 in 5 doesn’t show.

This is where we believe video interviewing changes things. Video interviewing gets past that initial let-down and goes straight to genuinely interested candidates who make the effort to send in a video. Of course it also provides you with the obvious benefit of getting a feel for them in a matter of minutes.

First impressions count

There’s an argument to say that no other type of recruitment relies on first impressions as much contact centre recruitment. After all, the approach the candidate adopts with you is the one that is put in front of your clients!

Video Interviewing for contact centres can save a company thousands. Think of all the travel that is saved, the extra recruitment teams pulled in just to run assessment centres and campaigns. Video interviewing takes all that away. Candidates can simply login to their smartphones, tablets or laptops – anywhere with a webcam and answer a series of questions that you can preload.

You then choose whether they get to see the questions in advance or on the day. You can run your basic assessment questions through it and what’s great is that you can simply sort and sift your chosen candidates from any device of your own.

Remove the need for scheduling

If there are a few of you in a team responsible for recruitment, you’ll be aware of just how tricky it can be to get everyone in one place at any time – video interviewing again relieves that pressure by enabling you to share your shortlists and get feedback from colleagues – without the usual scheduling challenges.

The best thing for us, at Shine, is seeing that eureka moment when a contact centre hiring manager realises just how much cost and time saving it could be for them. They start imagining what it would be like to sift through candidates from their sofa on a Saturday morning on their iPad rather than turning up at 7am in the rain for a first round set of interviews with hundreds of candidates – I know which one I’d be choosing – don’t you?