Fill Your Contact Center Seats with Passion, Not Just People!


By Tom Cunningham

World-renowned soccer superstar, Mia Hamm, once said, “If you don’t love what you do, you won’t do it with much conviction or passion.” As leaders, it’s not only our job to achieve the goals set before us but to assemble a team that will turn goals into reality. Far too many of us have the mentality of just “getting people in seats” instead of taking the time to find the team members who have the passion and drive to achieve our key performance indicators (KPIs) and make brand ambassadors of our customers along the way.

We get hundreds of resumes that sum up a potential team member’s education, job history, tenure at each stop, and what they accomplished along the way. It’s impossible to gauge the person’s passion and fit within our culture by reading resumes. It’s a process that can become monotonous at times when we search for the checklist of required qualifications and skills based on a sheet of paper.

The sad part is that we have been trained to accept this as the way the recruiting process has always been done. We typically look for two or three things that seem to align with our job qualifications and duties, interview potential candidates with age-old questions—which many applicants have researched online for tips or make up stories to fit what they think we are looking for—and decide if we should choose them to fill one of the available seats.

This mentality has us in a vicious cycle where we are always in the hiring mode, dealing with people who only show up for a paycheck, or, worst of all, are detrimental to our culture. To combat this issue, my team and I have evolved our hiring process over the last year to approach it as if we were looking for the next Mia Hamm to lead our team onto the field.

How did we do this? We put our culture and core values at the forefront of our recruiting process. Yes, we still must go through resumes and review an applicant’s basic information to ensure they meet the required qualifications, but we don’t talk about their job history or technical aptitude in detail until the final round of the process. We can always teach our platform and business model, but we can’t teach passion or change an applicant’s character.

Phone Interview

The first step is the phone interview. During this phase, we talk about our core values with the potential candidate, outline each value in detail, and explain how each value affects every aspect of our team members’ workday. From employee evaluations to each interaction on the phone with a customer, our core values will be the judge of an employee’s success, so it’s critical applicants understand that from the beginning. We share with our applicants the following examples of how we rate our employees:

  • You have passion, drive, and perseverance.
  • You show respect to others, no matter what position you hold within the company.
  • You understand that every opinion is valuable and that great ideas can come from anyone.
  • You seek opportunities to learn and further your understanding of our business.
  • You share knowledge and experience with others in a constructive way.
  • You contribute positively while in meetings.

Providing concrete examples of what the applicant would be evaluated on during our phone interview process has filtered out many people just looking for a job where they can occupy a seat. It lets them know it will be impossible to hide within our center and merely collect a paycheck.

Instead, applicants know up front that we will be looking at them every day—from their performance on the phone to how they engage with every staff member in the company—to gauge if they are successful members of the team. This approach either energizes applicants to become more excited about our company or it drives them away to find an employer who will accept their desire to do the minimum.

Play a Game

The second step is where we interview the applicant for culture fit and determine if they have the passion to help us deliver the greatest customer service possible. Applicants come to the office dressed in their best, with crisp copies of their resumes, expecting the same old questions they have heard repeatedly.

Surprise! We casually greet them at the entrance, conduct brief introductions, and lead them not to a conference room but to our break room. Once there we enthusiastically ask, “What game are we going to play?”

Once applicants get over the shock of what they just heard, we invite them to put their resumes, ties, purses, portfolios, and jackets on a couch and choose between pool, air hockey, supersized Jenga, or Connect Four.

During this phase of the process, our goal is simple: Do we see this person fitting in with our culture? What are they passionate about? Finally, how did they adapt to our environment versus the old, traditional interview process? It’s a time to pull back the layers and see who this person is and what they are all about. We ask questions such as:

  • Do you consider yourself a nerd? Why or why not?
  • Do you prefer DC or Marvel or neither? Why?
  • What do you like to do for fun or to relax?
  • What does customer service mean to you?
  • What is the greatest customer service experience you ever had and why?
  • What is the latest book you’re reading? Tell me about your favorite parts and why?
  • What core value have you connected with the most during your career? Why?
  • Do you prefer Apple or Android? Why?

Spending some time playing whatever game they have chosen while making conversation with these types of questions is the catalyst of our evaluation process. Does their tenacity, passion, and drive about their personal and professional lives translate to what we seek in an employee? If the consensus is yes, only then do we set up a sit-down interview with some of our other leaders within the customer service department.

The Interview

The sit-down interview is when we look at the candidate’s resume and technical aptitude. If we believe they can learn our platform, we’ll give them the chance to join our team. However, instead of making this phase the quintessential part of the interview process, it’s the conclusion.

This process has led to two main changes. First, we turn away a lot more people than we hire compared to the past. Second, we have yet to lose anyone to attrition during the training phase.

Have the courage to do something different. Not only will your results be different, they will be rewarding.

Tom Cunningham is the North American director of SAAS Operations at PerfectServe. Tom has over twenty-two years of call center operations management experience. He can be reached at 865-719-6960 or Tcunningham@perfectserve.net.

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