How Does a Leading Wireless Company Continue to Win the Labor Chase?

Their catchy jingles and slogans might explain how they become leading wireless carriers in the United States, but what is the reason for their tremendous success in employee recruitment?

The Senior Staffing Operations Manager at a leading wireless company attributes their success to the effective candidate engagement component they’ve woven into their outsourced recruitment process. She recalls the recruitment strategy prior to their discovery of the impact that introducing human touch and engaging the candidate early in the process can have on both finding and keeping top talent. That discovery and the resulting modification to the process led to a 15% improvement in their Call Center recruitment efforts.

Across the 48 call centers in the United States, the recruiting team facilitates 16,000 annual hires on average. Without the right recruitment strategies and processes in place, undoubtedly that could be a daunting task. “Quickly filling our call center openings with highly qualified customer service reps is mission critical for our organization, as that enables us to deliver consistent service to our wireless customers,” explained the Senior Staffing Operations Manager.

To help ensure a cost effective strategy for attracting and retaining the right people for these key service oriented positions, the wireless company selected PeopleScout as their recruitment partner. PeopleScout has been providing Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) services since 1992 to some of America’s largest employers, has screened more than 35 million candidates and has helped HR departments across a variety of industries make high-volume hiring more efficient and cost-effective. Their unique-to-the-industry “click or call” solution allows candidates to access and be pre-screened for employment opportunities either through the web or over the phone via live recruiters.

In the beginning

When the wireless company was developing its recruitment process, the strategy was very clear. “We wanted to make it easy for our candidates to learn about our employment opportunities and enable those who were qualified to quickly move to the next step in the recruitment process,” explains the Senior Staffing Operations Manager. She knew they needed to be accessible to candidates during non-traditional recruitment hours and thus required a system that would allow candidates to be screened for the opportunity at anytime from anywhere.

PeopleScout developed a customized web-based solution, through which candidates responding to the wireless company’s recruitment advertisement would be seamlessly connected to this online recruitment tool that provided detailed information on the employment opportunity and screened the candidate for qualifications. Those who were qualified could then self-select an onsite appointment slot.

In addition to making it easier for candidates to seek employment, “we wanted to provide web-only access to create a self-service approach that would appeal to this data-savvy candidate pool,” explained the Senior Staffing Operations Manager. And in many ways it did. By eliminating phone access and driving responders to the web, the candidate could seek out the information they wanted at their convenience and at their own pace and ad response was right where it needed to be.

The discovery

Even though response was steady utilizing just the “click” of the “click or call” solution and the screening process was successfully eliminating unqualified candidates, data was showing that far too many pre-qualified candidates were not scheduling themselves to the onsite appointment, which was the next step in the recruitment process. Further exacerbating the problem was the fact that as many as 50% of those who did schedule the appointment were not showing up for the interview.

Clearly there was a need to learn the root cause for the poor show rates and lack of self generated appointments. The wireless company could then use the findings to modify the recruitment process and improve results. With the advantage of having more than 350 live recruiters in their call center, PeopleScout was uniquely poised to immediately place hundreds of outbound calls to these qualified candidates to ask them why they didn’t schedule the interview or if they had, why they didn’t show up for the interview.

“What we learned was that while the candidates’ need to access the employment opportunity at anytime from anywhere was being met and that they found the web-based pre-screening process to be professional and user-friendly, they were not scheduling the interview because the appointment times they wanted weren’t available,” explained the Senior Staffing Operations Manager. “Not getting the real-time feedback you could get when having part of the pre-screening over the phone was certainly a limitation of the web-only process,” she continued. They also learned that these candidates were uneasy about not being able to confirm the process or the next steps with someone live. They not only questioned the legitimacy of setting up the interview appointment, but also didn’t feel any real sense of commitment to keeping it.

The Solution

PeopleScout added the phone-based option back into the wireless company’s recruitment process. Now candidates have an option. They can speak to a recruiter who will screen them for the position, and once qualified, will schedule them to an interview or for those who prefer the web, they can start the process online and once pre-qualified, they are prompted to call an 800 number for further screening and to be scheduled for the interview.

Now with every candidate ultimately speaking to a recruiter, both engagement in and compliance to the process was significantly improved. Candidates were able to ask questions, could select alternate interview times, knew where they stood in the process and became excited about the opportunity. At the same time, the recruiters were able to screen for communication skills and motivational fit, create a sense of candidate accountability by having the candidates repeat back to them their appointment date and time and provide the wireless company with continuous candidate feedback for real-time process improvements.

“The results were dramatic,” commented the Senior Staffing Operations Manager. “We saw a significant increase in qualified candidates being scheduled to interviews and as much as a 36% increase in our show rate at some locations just from adding the phone option back into the recruitment process. This process change even impacted candidate quality, as our hiring ratio improved by 9%.”

There were other collateral benefits to this process change and to improving results. The hiring managers were able to spend their time with only the most qualified candidates, freeing them up to focus on high-impact initiatives that drive improved employee acquisition and retention strategies, and they were able to reduce overall recruitment costs. The excessive no show rates had caused the wireless company to run more recruitment ads and add more appointment times, which meant more man-hours in order to generate and interview enough candidates to fill training classes. By reducing no shows, the company could reduce their media spend, hiring manager time, administrative costs and cost per hire. They were also able to eliminate the risk of having to run into overtime costs or considering temp-to-hire fees to ensure there weren’t vacancies in the call center.

“The key is candidate engagement,” revealed the Senior Staffing Operations Manager. “Giving your recruitment process a voice, making the process enjoyable and building candidate confidence, getting the candidate excited about the employment opportunity and creating commitment and accountability early in the employee lifecycle is what leads to finding and keeping the top talent necessary to win in today’s tight labor market.”

PeopleScout uses live recruiters and web-based technologies to provide personal and professional recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), helping companies make high-volume hiring more efficient and cost-effective. Whether it's a complete end-to-end RPO solution or an individual component in the recruitment process, PeopleScout has the experience, infrastructure, resources and best practices to ensure successful recruiting, refining, hiring and retention. Since 1992, PeopleScout has screened more than 35 million job candidates. Last year alone they helped their clients facilitate more than 187,000 hires for industries such as banking, telecommunications, retail, utilities, hospitality and transportation. For more information, please visit www.peoplescout.com or call 800-966-4803.