Are you looking to expand your customer service team?
Whether your customer service recruitment requirements are one, five or 50 new members of staff, it’s important to get your strategy right to ensure that you hire the right people for your team.
Webrecruit knows how important building a strong customer service team is – after all, these employees will be the friendly face or voice of your business. As such, we’ve put together a list of our top five tips to make sure that you nail your next customer service recruitment drive:
1. Don’t dismiss a candidate due to lack of experience
In many customer service roles, a candidate’s soft skills can be just as important as their previous experience.
Unless you’re recruiting for a high level customer complaints position or a role with supervisory or management responsibilities, you should be open to considering candidates who might not have previous customer service experience.
Strong communication skills, a friendly demeanour and a genuine desire to help should be high on your list of priorities for a new member of your customer services team.
However, as these are qualities that can be difficult to gauge from a CV, you should consider telephone screening candidates prior to their face-to-face interviews to get a general idea of their communication skills and telephone manner.
2. Ensure you have an efficient way of managing your vacancies
Customer service vacancies tend to be popular and often result in a high number of applications. As such, it’s vital that you have an effective way of managing your incoming CVs.
If you find yourself managing your applications using emails and spreadsheets, we’d recommend investing in some kind of recruitment technology to make the process a bit easier.
By using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), such as Webrecruit ATS, you can sort candidates into individual pots, allowing you to monitor exactly what stage of the application process each candidate is at.
3. Ensure you have an effective plan in place for telephone screening
If you’re planning on screening your candidates via the telephone, it’s important to think about what you actually want to achieve from this part of the recruitment process.
Is the telephone screen simply a formality to check that candidates have good communication skills or will you treat it like a first stage interview? Will it be an informal chat or will you have a specific set of questions for candidates to answer.
However you choose to conduct your telephone screening, make sure that you have a plan in place and ask all candidates the same questions to give them an equal chance to impress.
4. Don’t let the candidate experience falter
When managing a high volume of applications, it’s all too easy for the candidate experience to suffer. However, maintaining a positive candidate experience is particularly important when it comes to recruiting new customer service staff for your business.
The experience you provide to candidates should be in line with the experience that your business aims to provide to its customers. Treating your candidates well sets a precedent for how you’d like them to work if they joined your business in a customer service role.
Make sure that candidates are kept updated of the progress of their applications (again, an ATS can help you with this) so no-one is left guessing or chasing feedback.
5. Consider getting some assistance if you’re recruiting a high volume of staff
Sometimes it can be tricky for lean HR teams to manage an influx of applications, sift through them all, telephone screen them and arrange interviews and assessment days.
For some businesses, these volume projects don’t occur very often so they don’t have the resources in place to be able to manage them entirely in-house. As such, it’s worth finding a company to partner with on a temporary basis to assist with the advertising and telephone screening.
Webrecruit has worked on a number of volume recruitment projects and advertising campaigns for customer service staff. Find out more about how we can help you.
