Summary
This BPO is an innovative, US-based business process outsourcing provider. Since its inception in 2009, the company has been providing services for hundreds of clients including Teladoc, Priceline and Sweetgreen. What sets this leading BPO apart is their fully virtual workforce of thousands of independent contractors, which operates in 41 states throughout the US. These remote, independent contractors enjoy the flexibility to schedule their own working hours and balance their professional and personal lives the way they see fit. This flexibility gives the contact center a considerable competitive advantage when it comes to recruiting new talent.
Although this BPO’s flexible model works as a pull factor in bringing in new talent, it does present its marketplace coordinators (who are tasked with recruiting) with a number of challenges. When leveraging a remote workforce, sourcing (hiring) decisions have to be made without ever meeting in person. Combine that with the organization’s high candidate volumes (2000+ on a weekly basis in 2019), double digit YoY-growth and emphasis on candidate experience, and it becomes clear that sourcing is no easy feat.
In 2019, the team was looking for ways to continue growing their contractor network sustainably. This innovative organization began to look for a way to transform their labor-intensive, manual process into a digital one that could overcome these challenges and set them up for future success.
The team set out to find a partner that could team up with them to build a fully digital, remote, and scalable recruitment process to manage their high volumes of candidates and help select the right candidates. After carefully evaluating multiple vendors in the pre-employment software domain, the team decided to partner with Harver.
Together with Harver, this US-based BPO has built a fast and scalable digital recruitment process. Candidates now go from applying to self-scheduling an interview within 35 minutes, and are ready to start providing service within as few as 3.5 days. Harver’s matching technology enables their talent team to make data-driven decisions while reducing unconscious bias, and ensures that every qualified candidate is placed into the opportunity that they are best suited for.
The Challenges
This fast growing business process outsourcing provider has a fully remote contractor network. And although remote-work and flexibility is extremely attractive for candidates, it presented recruiters with a number of challenges:
Remote Sourcing
Fluctuating client demand
"We have clients in, for instance, the travel sector. If there’s a hurricane, or just recently, extensive holiday cancellations, then all of a sudden the call volume is going to spike very, very quickly. Therefore, we need to be able to find, assess, contract, and activate new agents fast."
A lengthy process
The incumbent manual process resulted in a 21-day long time to source. Marketplace coordinators would need to review applications, send emails to qualified candidates and schedule phone interviews that would last 30 minutes each. In this phone interview, a coordinator would assess if an applicant had what it takes to become an independent contractor, and which of the 4 possible roles they would be best suited for.
High candidate volumes
Because of its high growth rate, this company was experiencing high volumes of candidates, averaging around 2000 weekly. With the consistent Y-o-Y growth, the team understood that this volume would undoubtedly grow larger in the near future.
These challenges combined made it clear to the team that a lasting solution was needed. At this point in time, the structure of the selection process was inhibiting company growth. It became a top priority to optimize the process and cement their position as a leading contact center services provider.
The Objectives
With a firm grasp on their challenges, the team started working on the main objectives to tackle. The BPO’s leadership decided that digitization of the manual recruiting process was the way forward and to make sure the company was set-up for the future, their new sourcing process needed to meet a number of requirements:1. Digital and remote-first
The new process needed to be a digital one, fully built to optimize remote sourcing – the BPO’s core business. This meant it needed to be accessible from anywhere and any device, and assess for job related skills instead of past experience.2. Scalable
This contact center has clients across many different industries with demand ebbing and flowing over time. The new process had to be scalable and flexible.3. Improved efficiency and speed
With a 21-day time to source, the team recognized that improving efficiency and speed would be extremely valuable to save expensive work hours and allow their talent team to focus on high-impact priorities.4. High volume ready
This new sourcing process needed to be capable of handling, not only the high volumes they currently dealt with, but also those from unforeseen client demand as well as future growth.The Solution
An end-to-end digital process
Scalable at will
self-schedule interviews right away. This in turn lets the organization easily scale up or down depending on candidate volume.
Speed and efficiency through automation
Top prospective contractors are now able to set themselves up for an interview within 35 minutes from starting the application. Previously, this took up to one week.
The sourcing process then continues with screening phone calls conducted by coordinators. The length of these calls has been reduced to 10-12 minutes instead
of the 30 minutes that each call took previously.
"We became at least twice as efficient with the phone assessment. It also allowed us to process many more candidates."
High volume ready
Harver’s matching component laid the foundation for a data-driven approach to candidate selection for this leading BPO. All candidates are assessed based on the same criteria, which reduces the sourcing bias and ensures that fair sourcing practices are maintained. What’s more, this employer uses the contractor performance data to optimize the process and tailor selection models further to continue making sure that they’re matching agents to the best opportunities for them.Results
Looking at the results, the overall time from application to activation in the BPO’s independent contractor marketplace decreased from 21 to 3.5 days on average. An 83% reduction!
The team is now able to do more with less and process more applicants faster than ever before.
“If we wanted to be just as productive without Harver, we would need 205 people to handle the selection process. Now we’re working with a team of 35.”
In short, every marketplace coordinator is 585% more effective in his/her work.
Standardizing the candidate selection process also allowed the organization to reduce bias in their sourcing practices and base their decisions on relevant data on applicants’ skills and abilities.
“Having an effective solution in place and eliminating those biases is just so incredibly valuable for our success. It helps us drive consistent sourcing decisions.”
This remote-based BPO is now able to source more contractors faster, which gives them a competitive advantage in the contact center services market to win new clients and grow.
