4 ways Call Recording can help achieve top biller status

Recruitment has always been a highly competitive sector with consultants and agencies pitted against one another to achieve top biller or best agency status. The challenge any staffing agency has, is to replicate the successes of their top recruitment specialists whilst learning from the mistakes; and then using these insights to drive better performance and revenue, increasing at the same time employer and candidate satisfaction.

Call recording is not a new concept, historically being used by contact centres for call quality monitoring and banks for compliance. Following on from the last article we wrote in 2014 on ‘Using call recording for recruitment to give you an edge’, and the interest we’ve been receiving from this particular market, we thought it timely to provide you with an update on how recording your calls can help you maximise your top billers and strengthen your USPs.

Call recording for recruitment

Here we delve deeper into the benefits this technology can bring for recruitment agencies, proving that call recording really is a no-brainer for this industry.

1. Training, benchmarking and best-practice

It’s simple. Past call recordings can be used to build up a library of different types of calls. This pool of knowledge will then be readily available to use for a number of different purposes including:

• Finding out what employers and candidates are talking about. What are their main drivers, their difficulties, their objectives?
• Pinpoint the exact characteristics and techniques behind a successful call. The good calls (including those with great negotiations on contracts or salaries) can be used as best practice calls for new and existing consultants.
• Pinpointing the characteristics behind a not so successful call. Similarly, these can be used for benchmarking and training purposes for underperforming consultants as well as new ones.
• Using past recordings for role playing purposes involving ‘real life’ scenarios, with a particular focus on certain situations which might be challenging or difficult to handle. This can include tricky questions being asked by an employer or an accusatory statement being made by a candidate. As a result, these calls can uncover golden nuggets of information including particular techniques and tips on how to address these situations in the future.

2. Provide an absolute account of ‘who said what’

Similarly you can learn a lot from the very bad calls and use call recording as a means of resolving disputes as well as fact verification purposes. Have you or your client been unfairly accused of employment discrimination during the interview process? Is there a discrepancy in the contractor salary rate you agreed with the client versus what was promised to the contractor? Call recordings can provide an absolute account of ‘who said what’ helping smooth over any issues and build trust in recruiter, candidate and client relationships.

3. Dare to be different – provide clients with recorded telephone interviews

Call recordings which support the reasoning behind your candidate selection process could be provided to clients as a value add service and could also mean the difference between a client placing a job role with your recruitment agency over another. If you are able to provide recordings of telephone interviews to the client in advance of them meeting the candidate, this can become the key differentiator needed for your agency in building the best portfolio over others.

4. Pro-actively market good candidates using audio interviews

On the flip side of this, you may have a candidate you telephone interviewed who is not right for a particular client but may be perfectly suited to another role you have been trying to fill. Just think how powerful it would be to not only send across that candidates CV to your client for a potential offering, but also a call recording of the telephone interview you conducted which perfectly captures the reasons behind why you have chosen to put this candidate forward in the first place.

The most successful recruitment consultants according to Karin Schroeck-Singh’s blog on 15 Qualities a great recruiter must have tend to share one thing in common, they require great listening and communication skills. Having said this, it is well known that recruiters spend a large amount of their time on the phone. Can you really afford not to have a way of measuring how successful these qualities really are, whilst gaining an insight into the conversations taking place and the reasons behind successful placements?

To find out more about the call recording options available contact our team.