Hiring the wrong candidate can cost you a lot of money. It’s crucial you make sure employees are the right fit for your company before making an offer. How do you find the right employees?

People can fudge the truth on their resumes or even do well in their interviews. Tests that assess a candidate’s skills and capabilities can show you if they’re the right fit for your team.

If you want to create your own call center assessment tests for your small business, keep reading for our top seven tips.

1. Assess Your Candidate’s Personality

When you include personality in your call center assessment tests, you can get a better understanding of your candidates. Unlike other assessments, the personality part isn’t a “test”. The personality portion of the assessment is about the candidate and their preferences, behavior, and character.

It’s also important you make sure that the qualities and characteristics you’re assessing correlate to on-the-job performance. This ensures the most accurate results. For instance, a candidate who excels in customer focus skills would perform well as an inbound contact center employee.

We at Success Performance Solutions offer a wide range of different personality tests for your candidates. Click here to take a look!

2. Test Multitasking Skills

Working as a call center employee requires excellent multi-tasking skills. A typical workday involves switching between calls and tasks, looking up information while on a call, and much more. It also wouldn’t be unusual for call center representatives to communicate or handle more than one customer or client at once!

Many people think they’re great at multitasking, but many are wrong without even realizing they are. Being great at multitasking means you can give the best response to each individual and switch between tasks rapidly.

Testing multitasking skills in your call center assessment tests can help you weed out the candidates who may get easily overwhelmed.

3. Assess Typing Skills

A lot of jobs these days involve typing, but for call-center representatives, typing is an essential part of their role. Call center representatives need to communicate through many channels like email or chat boxes. Most importantly, call center representatives need to communicate quickly and efficiently.

Candidates who are slow at typing means they might not answer customer questions as quickly as needed. You can’t afford to hire someone who takes a long time to type out messages, resulting in upset customers who demand swift help.

Testing typing skills in your call center assessment tests can help assess how a candidate will perform on the job. A typing assessment will also let you know how your candidate types, whether it’s slow but correct, or quick but with lots of mistakes.

4. Include Computer Literacy

Like typing skills, computer literacy skills are essential for most call center jobs. But call center representatives often need to know more than knowing how to use basic apps and tools.

If your company uses specific software, your candidate will need to be able to learn how they work. Testing computer literacy skills enables you to find out which candidates can understand new software and the processes that go along with them.

Sometimes, candidates who have a weak understanding of computers and technology might be too challenging to train. However, a candidate who doesn’t have extensive knowledge of computers and technology shouldn’t discredit a candidate. Some people are fast learners, so remember to also look for trainability in a candidate.

5. Vet Language Skills

While it’s true many people embellish or fudge the truth on their resumes, some people will flat out lie. Sometimes you might need to hire call center representatives fluent in another language. The keyword here is fluent.

A candidate may claim to be fluent in Spanish when in reality, he or she took one semester of Spanish in high school. This is why, before making an offer, you should test their language skills first. Vetting language skills in your call center assessment tests is a surefire way to do this.

Be sure to include grammar, spelling, and reading comprehension in your language skill assessment. It’s better to find out that a candidate doesn’t meet the necessary qualifications during the interview process.

6. Include an Organizational Fit Assessment

Including an organization fit assessment makes it easier to assess whether a candidate will fit within your company’s or organization’s culture. This is important not only for you as the employer but also for your employees’ happiness.

An organizational fit assessment asks potential hires to rate or rank certain aspects of a company. These aspects should relate to company culture (leadership expectations, peer expectations, etc.). To see if a candidate is a match, look at their responses and compare them to how your company rates and ranks these aspects.

Some people may leave when they’re unhappy and feel their position doesn’t meet their expectations. Not including an organizational fit assessment when interviewing candidates can result in a high employee turnover rate.

7. Include a Situational Judgment Test

Customers can be unpredictable with their questions, problems, or challenges. Sometimes, they can be flat out rude. Your contact center employees deal directly with your customers, which means handling disgruntled or upset customers. Your call center representative needs to turn their customer experience around if a customer isn’t satisfied or, worse, unhappy with your brand.

If you want to measure how a candidate may respond to different events, be sure you include a situational judgment in your call center assessment tests. If you’re hiring contact center employees, you can test how they would handle a call or email from an unsatisfied customer.

This gives candidates a better idea of what to expect during a typical workday, such as common challenges that may arise.