Are Your Job Ads Holding Back Your Contact Centre Recruitment?

Recruitment is tough and competitive right now, but there are changes you can make to your job adverts to help your roles stand out and attract more applicants.

In this article, Julie Mordue of greenbean shares tips and advice for improving your job adverts.

How to Make Your Job Adverts Stand Out

Here are 9 ways make sure your job adverts aren’t holding back your contact centre recruitment:

1. Stop Copying and Pasting the Job Description Into Your Advert!

News flash! A job advert is very different from a job description.

A job advert showcases what it’s like to work for your company and includes a high-level overview of the type of candidate needed.

By contrast, the job description details the day-to-day tasks, which can be discussed after someone has engaged in finding out more about the specific job role and responsibilities.

This is particularly pertinent in the call centre industry, as job descriptions can be near-identical for call centre agents and come with similar salaries, so you need to highlight what makes your company different to stand out and attract the most applicants.

Although if you are looking for inspiration for your job descriptions, read our article: Typical Roles in a Call Centre – With Job Descriptions

2. Highlight the Purpose Behind the Role

Today’s talent is looking for purpose in what they do.

They are looking for more transparency in terms of what they’re going to be doing and why, and what they’re going to get out of it – above and beyond reward and recognition.

Today’s talent is looking for purpose in what they do.

For example, if the agent’s role will be to talk to clients about outstanding payments, it can help to add some more detail around the purpose, such as ‘helping clients to better manage their finances’.

Purpose also extends to conversations around sustainability, their social values, the company culture, diversity agenda, and more.

3. Talk About the Future

Applicants want to know what’s in it for their longer-term career progression too. Therefore, one way to make sure your job adverts aren’t holding back your contact centre recruitment is to mention the doors the role could open in future.

If there are well-trodden career paths in your contact centre, now is the time to shout about them. Even more so if there are also opportunities to progress into management, as well as other departments such as Quality, Training, and Planning.

You could even include a mini case study of how Jessica progressed from agent to team leader and then became a trainer within 5 years.

One way to make sure your job adverts aren’t holding back your contact centre recruitment is to mention the doors the role could open in future.

That being said, please note, it’s really important to strike a balance here of talking about what’s possible, but managing expectations that the initial role first and foremost is for a contact centre advisor for at least X amount of time (as per your personal expectations) to gain a firm understanding of how the contact centre works.

Otherwise you’re just perpetuating a leaky bucket of staff turnover, and over-promising on available career progression opportunities which could bite you in the long term.

4. Create More Than One Advert for the Same Role

One advert won’t suit everybody.

If you’re keen to attract more applicants, invest time in tweaking your job advert and repurposing it to appeal to different demographics – from graduates, to working parents, and more.

All of these demographics will have different priorities and want to see different elements of the role highlighted in order to appeal to them.

5. Stop Hyping Up Standard Benefits

All too often, you’ll see job adverts saying ‘fantastic benefits package’ quickly followed by a brief mention of a pension. This is not “fantastic” – it’s a legal requirement.

6. Stop and Think About Neurodiverse Candidates Too

Be conscious of how you might be excluding neurodiverse candidates in your choice of wording.

If you’re focusing on ‘attention to detail’ or ‘good social skills’, you may be losing applicants who are deselecting themselves from the process because of these mentioned traits.

To discover more about neurodiverse recruitment, read our article: An Introduction to… Championing Neurodiversity in the Contact Centre

7. Talk About How You’re Driving the Diversity Agenda

If you’re making great strides forward in the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion agenda, talk about it in your job advert!

Many candidates will want to know you’re serious about it and what you’re doing to drive progress – for example, if you’ve signed the Race at Work Charter.

It will also help you stand out against the competition who may be a bit behind in this area.

8. Make It Clear What Transferable Skills You’re Looking For

If you say you’re specifically looking for someone with experience from a contact centre setting, you are probably missing out on people that have got fantastic customer service skills and/or had great training in the hospitality sector.

So be sure to welcome people with a broader customer experience background by including a phrase such as ‘will have the transferable customer service skills from either a contact centre, retail, or hospitality environment’.

Struggling to think of what skills you are looking for, read this article for more: The Top 10 Most Important Customer Service Skills

9. Don’t Ask for 2+ Years of Experience for an Entry-Level Role

Asking for a certain amount of experience (e.g. 2 years) is another way to shut out potential applicants and discriminate for what could be an entry-level role.

For example, if they’re 18-year-old school leavers, they won’t have that experience yet – and won’t be applying to work in your contact centre if they deselect themselves based on those criteria.

Thanks to Julie Mordue of greenbean, contact centre recruitment specialists, for this great article.

If you are looking for more information on developing your contact centre recruitment process, read these articles next:

• 6 Top Tips for Maintaining Quality Recruitment Under Pressure
• How to Write a Successful Recruitment Strategy
• Top 50 Customer Service Interview Questions – with Answers

Author: Julie Mordue
Reviewed by: Megan Jones