Tips for Interviewing for Potential
1 Mar, 2007
By: Vicki HerrellThere are many different areas to ask about when interviewing for potential workforce management professionals. And different questions may apply depending upon whether you are hiring someone off the call center floor that would be promoted to this position or someone from the outside with previous workforce management experience.
Here are a few ideas of questions for an in-house candidate:
• What is your perception of what the workforce management team does? This will establish a base understanding of the entire operation or at least how much the applicant knows coming in.
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how is your own compliance to schedule and your quality scores? See how the applicant rates himself or herself versus the reports you can run on them if they are in-house hires.
• Scenario: A friend needs a favor (adjust an exception to cover compliance, adjust available hours to get some time off since limits are full) and asks you to help him or her— how do you respond?
If the candidate has previous workforce management experience, these questions might be applicable:
• Have you ever been responsible for scheduling staff? What were your methods? What did you find challenging about it? What did you find rewarding about it?
• Have you worked on a project that required “buy-in” from management? What kind of pre-work was required? Was a presentation required?
• Scenario: Every Friday, a department of 48 agents experiences high call volume between 12:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. The hours of operation are 7 a.m. – 7 p.m. Monday through Friday. The shifts for the employees are: 15 agents with a 7-4 shift, 10 agents with an 8-5 shift, 5 with a 9-6 shift, 5 with a 10-7 shift, and 13 floating shifts. All lunches and breaks are the same every day. Provide a solution to this problem. Note: You can give any scenario that fits your department. Also remember there are no right answers. Look at the method in which the applicant thinks this through. Is he or she methodical and can he or she think outside the box?
• A key responsibility of this position is preparing and maintaining a call center staffing model. Ask the candidate what experience he or she has with this process.
• How many representatives were involved?
• What are the components of this process?
• How did you prioritize them?
• Did you involve anyone else? (Who? Why?)
• What were the results?
• Decision-making, or judgment, is using logic and facts to choose a course of action. We are faced with several decisions on a daily basis, from the mundane to the serious. Ask the candidate to tell you about a decision he or she made concerning modifications to staffing that had the most positive impact at their last position.
• How many reps were impacted?
• Did the modifications work within the “normal guidelines” of the call center?
• What type of analysis was used?
• What were the results?
• Did you receive any feedback from the managers or staff? If yes, what was it?
• Was the process adopted by the call center? If yes, is it still being used?
Besides the normal analytical skills-type questions that should be asked, you can use a scenario question that helps get a feel for the individual’s capabilities around analyzing issues that may come from multiple areas. Ask the candidate to describe a situation that required looking at multiple pieces of data and determining which ones were having an effect on each other and what course of action (root cause analysis) would he or she use to determine what would be the best approach to improve the situation. It may take some time to develop a response, but it usually shows how a person is thinking about issues, whether one-dimensional or multi. A workforce manager has to be able to look at data and issues from a multi-level perspective to get a true picture of the impacts of numbers on each other.
The other area you might ask about is in the balancing of good customer service with the need to keep labor expenses at a reasonable rate. Ask the candidate, “What do you feel is a better situation — having more people than you need to answer calls, or not enough?” Look for an answer that shows how the individual would try to balance that number so that there aren’t too many on either side. This tells you that he or she recognizes the need to balance the workforce with appropriate staffing and also get the most from your labor expense.
Whether you are hiring a brand-new workforce manager or someone with several years of experience, these questions should help you determine if a candidate has the necessary skills to be successful in our hectic, fast-paced world.
