Virtual assessment center delivers better candidate experience

Challenges

Virtual experience for a virtual world

Cielo has provided Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) services to a global digital solution provider in some of the world’s most demanding businesses and governments. Key to our partnership is helping plan and deliver seamless talent acquisition processes for their support centers in Budapest and Pecs, Hungary. One of the main areas of focus is attracting Level 1 agents who provide day-to-day IT support to customers across the continent in one of more than 20 European languages.  

As COVID-19 spread across the globe in spring 2020, delivering the usual in-person assessment centers for high-volume Level 1 agent roles became untenable. Even before restrictions made it mandatory, a decision was made to deliver the assessment days remotely.

At typical sessions, groups of candidates would arrive at the center for a thorough assessment and introduction to the business and scope of their role. This would be followed by an IT test, a role-playing exercise carried out in their support language, and an interview. By the end of the assessment, each candidate would be told whether they had been successful. 

Our challenge was to quickly transfer this real-life experience into a virtual one, without damaging the candidate experience, diminishing the rigor of the assessment process, or reducing cost-effectiveness.

Solutions

Strategic process changes & tech transformation

Digitalization was at the heart of the solution as we moved to a virtual assessment process. But the changes were more than just technological. Aware that more of the process would now be one-to-one and more time-consuming for assessors, we changed the order of the assessment – providing the IT test to the candidates in advance in a timed online format.

This empowered candidates to choose the time they took the test, increasing uptake and engagement, and allowed us to deselect those without the appropriate skills early on.

As a result, we were only spending time and resources on performing one-to-one interviews with a pre-selected group. Cielo also provided an engaging range of materials and fact sheets to introduce the virtual candidates to the company and their role in it.

The candidates could now schedule the interview on their terms – a much smaller portion of time compared to an entire in-person assessment day. This made it more likely candidates would attend, reducing dropout rates.

It also meant that recruiters were able to concentrate their efforts on the one-to-one assessments. The assessments had two parts: Role-play scenarios that ensured the candidates had good customer service and communications skills with strong language fluency, and in-depth interviews that made sure candidates understood the role and had the necessary competencies.

“Going forward, it’s apparent that this model of virtual assessment has many advantages. The added flexibility it gives to the candidate drives engagement, whilst the employer receives a greater number of high-quality candidates. A change that has been forced on employers by the COVID crisis may now become permanent due to its cost-effectiveness and efficiency, " said Kirsten Mayer, Executive Vice President – People & Culture.

Results

Illuminating even more great talent

The results were impressive. Attendance for virtual assessments was much higher than in-person sessions: 95% compared to 66%.

The new processes also led to a substantially increased offer rate, with 50% of participants being offered a role. For real-life assessments that rate was only 37%. 

In the nine months before the virtual assessment was introduced, the average time from application to accepted offer was 41 days. In the nine months after virtual assessments began, this timeframe fell to 23 days.