Where have all the good people gone?

Gayle, the Human Resources Manager, was ecstatic. She had just joined CALLUS as the HR Manager for their large call centre in Vancouver, British Columbia. The call centre had 1000 employees. As soon as she arrived her new team was eager to meet with her. But Gayle soon realized there was a problem. The turnover in the call centre, that being the number of people who were quitting their jobs, was 15%. This meant that 150 positions needed to be hired each year just to fill the position vacated by resignations. In addition, the CALLUS executive had plans to increase the size of the call centre by 200 people this year. This meant that call centre HR team Gayle was leading would have to hire approximately 30 people per month, every month, for the next year.

When Gayle met with Sandra and Dave, the two call-centre recruiters on the team, they quickly announced that the big challenge faced by the team was that they had exhausted the pool of good available call centre staff. The call centre was located in Burnaby, BC, just outside of Vancouver. Call centre staff typically came from Burnaby or Vancouver, and some came from Surrey. When Gayle asked for further explanation of the challenge, staff outlined that as a result of continually hiring call centre staff over the last number of years, they had exhausted the available applicants and this was affecting the quality of hires.

Most recently they hired a class of 30 employees to start together and participate in the rigorous 3-week training that all new hires underwent. Of this class of 30 hires, 2 did not show up on their 1st day of training, 5 had quit after 2 days, and 5 more had quit by the end of the training, leaving 18 of 30 workers. Furthermore, managers who had led the training provided feedback that they had concerns about the potential for success of many of these 18 remaining hires.

Gayle resolved that they needed to figure out and resolve this problem quickly or else they would fall far behind on their staffing plan. Recognizing that Vancouver, Burnaby, and Surrey have a combined population of 1.5 million people, it seemed odd to Gayle that they could not hire 30 good people each month. When she asked Sandra what the problem was, her assessment was that call centre jobs were not considered good jobs, so good people were not applying. Sandra thought the problem was poor salary and working conditions, so the jobs were only attractive to a small portion of the population. Sandra suggested we increase the wages paid to call centre workers and make the environment more inviting. Then, they could market these benefits and get more and better applicants.

When Gayle asked Dave, Dave thought the issue at hand was that they were not marketing the positions to the right people. Dave thought that they needed to analyze which on-line job sites the positions should be advertised on in order to get the right applicants for the jobs. Dave also suggested that there still was much uncertainty with regards to the profile of the ideal candidate. In the past, the assumption was always that call centre workers would be young people using this position as an entry into CALLUS. However, more and more the call centre was hiring older workers including single parents or retirees, and the company's recruitment messaging and strategy was still focussed on young workers.

Something was still missing for Gayle, so she asked Sandra to run a recruitment pipeline report for the entry-level call centre position. This report summarized the number of applicants, those interviewed, and those offered for the most recent group of hires. The data was as follows:

Applicants: 1,067
Candidates interviewed: 45
Offers: 32
Accepts: 30

Something was not right. Surely out of the 1067 applicants there had to be more than just 45 people worthy of being interviewed. When Gayle asked Sandra about this, she responded that the 1067 applicants were not just for this group of hires, but was the pool of all applicants for this position over the last 2 years. For the most part, the pool of applicants was exhausted. Of these applicants, only 100 had applied within the last month. Gayle could see that she had a real problem on her hands. Why were so few applicants applying to this position?

While she appreciated what Sandra and Dave had identified as the key issues, neither raising wages and nor changing working conditions was going to be possible in the near-future. The issue of marketing the positions needed further investigation. What Gayle realized was that the jobs were being posted automatically on the CALLUS website, as well as Workopolis and Monster, two large general-purpose job boards. Something was not right. Why weren't people applying? Gayle then went onto these job boards to see the CALLUS job postings. While they could be refreshed, the content should attract candidates. She then clicked on the "apply here" button, and realized the problem. The "apply here" button was not linked to the CALLUS application system. Applications were going somewhere else. As such, the only applications being received were from candidates who on their own went to the CALLUS website and applied. When Gayle asked Sandra about this, Sandra said she thought the applications went directly into the CALLUS system. Gayle asked Sandra to contact Monster and Workopolis to fix the link. That was on Friday Morning.

On Monday morning Gayle and the recruitment team had a new problem. On Friday the applicant pool was 1067. On Monday the applicant pool was 1389. 322 applications had come in over the week-end. Gayle called an emergency meeting to discuss the matter. She outlined that this was going to be a working session, and asked Sandra and Dave to print and bring the resumes for all of the applications received over the week-end. It was time to see if they were back in the recruiting business.

They went through the resumes one by one. What became apparent was that many of the candidates were not eligible to work in Canada. Additionally, based on the experience outlined on people's application, it would appear that applicants were still almost entirely young adults, and that an older demographic was not applying to the posting. However, the first screening of applications revealed that at least 100 applicant were suitable candidates. If this pattern continued, they would have to refine the application process to get the best people applying, and find a way to reduce the number of unqualified resumes being looked at by recruiters.

It was also apparent that changes may be needed in interviewing and selecting candidates. In the previous recruitment cycle, only 45 people were interviewed, largely based on those being the only suitable candidates. If the call centre now has far more suitable candidates, they may need to increase the number of telephone interviews done to help pre-select only the ideal candidates for in-person interviews. Alternately, there might be a need for more in-person interviews, and so additional managers may be needed to conduct interview.
Also, if there are more people being interviewed, they may need to put a more rigorous interview process in place to help compare candidates in order to hire the best applicants. The interview process up to this point was essentially an informal unstructured interview, where managers were selection candidates on "gut feel" as to whether they could do the job and would "fit in". Gayle had come from an organization that employed a Behavioural-Based Structured Interview, which was far more rigorous. But could all these managers and recruiters be trained? Gayle and her team were going to be busy.

Questions

1. Based on the challenges CALLUS is having in getting a demographic mix of young people and older workers to apply, what recommendations would you make to improve the attraction and selection of a more diverse talent pool?

2. Assuming that CALLUS has the challenge of identifying quality candidates from a large pool of applicants, how do you recommend that CALLUS adjust their selection practices?

3. As Sandra and Dave's manager, do you foresee any need for them to adjust their work to reflect the new reality of a larger applicant pool? What will you suggest?

4. If CALLUS wants to move away from selecting candidates based on "gut feel" to selecting best candidates for the job, what would you suggest as a way to (a) identify the ideal candidate profile, and (b) most effectively identify and select top candidates?