In our upcoming Staffing and Recruiting article, we talk about how important agent retention is to a call center. The other side of that is finding agents who match your call center's needs, skills, and culture. How do you zero in on the right candidates?

The answer is Pre-Hire Assessment Tools. As our chief technical editor Joe Fleischer wrote in last year's pre-hire assessment article:

"From a call center's perspective, the most important indicators of an agent's performance are those the center assesses before the agent comes on board. One challenge with assessments is that there is a difference between recognizing candidates who can help customers, and those who want to do so. You need different kinds of tools to reveal different information about what each candidate has to offer."

"There's so much more to determining whether or not someone is going to be a productive contributor in an organization than whether or not they can perform the job. That's a very important point. I'm not trivializing the importance of assessing job skills, I just think that people who are responsible for establishing these systems need to take the blinders off and better understand what it about people and jobs and how they overlap that is going to provide them with the best outcome."

It may not be easy to find the right agents, but there are plenty of firms that can help. Here's a partial Pre-Hire Assessment tools vendor list: