Randy Cohen's Ethicist column in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine had a call center-related question:

I was to screen candidates for a job at my office that requires considerable phone time with our high-end, snobbish customers. When my boss said, "Don't bring in anyone who wants to 'ax' you a question," my first reaction was that she wanted me to exclude African-Americans. My boss claims to support equal opportunity, but was she being racist here? -- name withheld, New York

Here's mine: This is a hiring question. As any conscientious hiring manager will tell you, discrimination and racial profiling is never appropriate. If we assume the best in the boss in the example above -- that she was not making a veiled request to avoid hiring people of a certain ethinicity -- then we're left with a question of good phone manner.

Call centers want to hire people who sound good on the phone. People with pleasant voices, who speak clearly.

But this can also be seen as a training question. Every center has its own style. Some rely on scripts so much that the individual agent's speaking style may not ever matter. Others want agents who will sound casual and unscripted. Most centers will train agents to answer calls the way they need them to answer calls.

Look at off-shore centers -- some Indian call centers will train their agents to sound like Americans or Britons. A great deal can be taught. So decide how much your center wants to teach and how much you want your applicants to bring to the job, but don't discriminate.

There's an interesting article in last week's New York Times about pre-hire assessments called "Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm."

"As we get bigger, we find it harder and harder to find enough people," Google’s Laszlo Bock, told the Times. "With traditional hiring methods, we were worried we will overlook some of the best candidates."

Google had been focusing on engineers with high college GPAs who interviewed well, but, Bock said, "Interviews are a terrible predictor of performance."

To find out what kind of people they needed, they asked the people they had -- with a 300 item questionnaire asking about knowledge, personaility, and behavior. It even asked about pets and reading habits. They compared the data to their employees' reviews and performance, analyzing two million data points. From that, Google analyst Dr. Todd Carlisle made surveys to give potential employees.

Then again, conceded Carlisle, "It’s like telling someone that you have the perfect data about who they should marry." But this ought to illustrate the importance of using all the information one can to make a sound hiring decision. No one's expecting that companies will cease to do interviews. But college grades aren't the only measure of potential, and neither are interviews.

Fortunately for the call center industry, there are well-established firms that have done the work for you so you don't have to come up with your own surveys and testing algorithms. We'll be talking to some of them in the next few days and we'll post some of their wisdom on the blog.

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: