Assessing Contact Centre & Customer Service Candidates

How should an employer go about assessing a contact centre candidate’s likelihood of succeeding in that environment, or in smaller scale customer services roles where the bulk of communications with customers take place over the phone or internet? Candidate assessment suites designed specifically for these environments tend to focus on a blend of abilities essential to success where information is …

Smart Time Hacks for High Volume Recruiting

Creating a credible shortlist, without letting good potential slip through the net is a tedious process, so it seems timely to share the positive points of good practice experienced when screening over five thousand applicants for four hundred graduate jobs in seven capitals across the European Union in just three months:

How to Pick Out the Sales-Superstars from the Rest when Recruiting sales staff

Selecting the most talented applicants for sales roles presents obstacles for employers and recruiting managers. Sales people typically interview well, are skilled in presenting positive images and brushing over what they don’t want their interviewer to know.  Sales candidates also tend to arrive with glowing references, but for differing reasons. Sales selection processes that allow candidates to avoid potential areas …

Sales Recruitment

Three Practical Steps to Sharpen Up Sales Staff Recruitment

It has been common knowledge for decades that the selection interview is a very poor predictor of whether a candidate is going to perform in any job. When it comes to sales jobs, the interview becomes even less effective, as most sales candidates are able to present themselves well at interview, be adept at brushing over the areas they would rather you didn’t explore and usually arrive with glowing references. Whilst some recruiting managers may see these factors as evidence of sales skills, most will grimace with pain in recalling occasions of hiring staff that were good at interviews but precious little else.

Working in Partnership to Prepare a Contact Centre Workforce

The past few months have been particularly rewarding for us in taking our long standing partnership with the regional Ministry of Social Development (MSD) office into new grounds of preparing this regions potential workforce for employment in contact centre environments. Drawing on the experiences of introducing contact centres to economically depressed regions in South Wales and the interventions to prepare …

Contact Centre Impact on Regional Economies

Kiwi Bank’s creation of c.150 permanent jobs in a region that is going backwards on most economic indicators is perhaps the best news we have had the pleasure of reporting for several years. People Central has handled in excess of 200 permanent job losses through redundancy support in the last 2 years and we know that is just a small …

Accountests is Launched in New Zealand

After twelve months of intensive design, construction and peer review involving accounting, web and software expertise from Europe and New Zealand, it was with great pleasure that we launched the website and online testing platform for our new sister company Accountests Ltd on 15th July. Accountests has been created to fill a widely felt void felt by recruiting managers, business …

Using Psychometric Testing in Redundancy Selection

The 5th July edition of New Zealand’s Dominion Post ran a major story on public sector staff in The Dept of Conservation and Ministry of Business & Innovation being required to complete personality questionnaires as part of a redundancy selection process. Whilst the article itself was somewhat flimsy journalism that got little further than identifying concerns over face validity of …

People Central win MSD Contract for 2013 Redundancy Support

We are delighted to announce that People Central Ltd have been awarded the Ministry of Social Development  (MSD) contract to continue to provide subsidised support in 2013 to Hawke’s Bay people at risk of losing their jobs through redundancy. Our track record in 2012 of getting 80% of participants back into comparable jobs within two months of learning that their …