A few months ago, we published the first edition of The BPO Hiring Playbook, Daniel Ash's field guide to hiring at BPO scale, built on a decade of work with some of the largest contact center operations in the world. It's dense. It's thorough. And, if we're honest, it's a lot to hand someone who just needs an answer to one specific question on a Tuesday afternoon.
So we started pulling the Playbook apart.
Our goal is to turn every major idea in the book into its own short, standalone guide: something a TA leader can read in fifteen minutes, hand to their VP, or drop into a working session with ops and finance. No 200-page commitment required, just one problem at a time, with the research and the worksheet to back it up.
Two guides are already live, and we are about to publish two more Here's where the series stands, and where it's headed.
The premise behind the whole Playbook is simple: hiring is a prediction problem. Every application question, every assessment, every interview exists to predict one of three outcomes: will this person perform, will they stay, and will they fit. If a step in your process doesn't help you predict one of those three things, it's not helping you. It's just noise.
Most hiring processes don't get built this way, though. They get built by accretion: a question added here because a hiring manager insisted on it, a filter added there because it was the default in the ATS. Nobody sits down and asks what they're actually trying to measure, or whether the method they're using is any good at measuring it.
That's the gap each guide in this series is meant to close: one part of the Playbook, made to be easily accessible.
There's also a practical reason we're doing this. Not everyone who needs this information has time to sit down with the full book. Sometimes you just need the one page that shows why cost-per-hire is the wrong metric, or the one table that ranks screening methods by how well they actually predict performance. The guides are built to be shared on their own: forwarded to a hiring manager, printed for a QBR, or dropped into a Slack channel followed by a "wait, why are we still doing unstructured phone screens?"
If you've been following along, you've likely already seen the first two guides on our LinkedIn page.
Screening Methods ranks the most common hiring methods (structured interviews, work samples, job simulations, cognitive tests, resume review, and more) by predictive validity, using decades of meta-analytic research in industrial-organizational psychology. The short version: methods that ask a candidate to do the job (work samples, simulations, structured interviews) consistently beat methods that ask a candidate to describe the job (resumes, years of experience, unstructured phone screens). Resume review and years-of-experience filters, two of the most common screens, land at the bottom of the leaderboard while structured interviews with a real scoring rubric land at the top.
The guide also maps each method to the right stage of the funnel, so the cheap, scalable screens run early and the expensive, high-touch ones, like the structured interview, get reserved for the smaller pool of candidates who've already cleared the bar. When sequenced well, this doesn't just improve accuracy. It frees up recruiter time for the conversations that actually need their attention.
The Real Cost of a Bad Hire tackles a problem most operations teams feel but can't quite price because most likely, nobody has seen the whole bill. Recruiting costs sit with talent acquisition. Training costs sit with ops. Manager time, team morale, client escalations, most of it never gets tracked at all, and none of it shows up under the "cost per hire" number everyone's scorecard is built around. The guide walks through the real, line-by-line cost of an early quit ($4,000 to $17,000, depending on how far someone gets before they leave), and stats that reframe the whole conversation.
Roughly three out of every four separations happen before a program even reaches breakeven. That means most attrition isn't a normal cost of doing business. It's money spent for zero return, and it's completely avoidable with better screening upstream.
One anecdote from the guide has stuck with us. Daniel, our founder, once sat in a working session with a healthcare technology client where the customer service director mentioned, as casually as telling him the time, that they regretted 99% of the hires they'd made that year. The sales director just nodded along. Nobody above the director level was reading the bill closely enough to know that a 99% regret rate was an emergency and not just how things were. That's what an unmeasured cost does: it doesn't just go unnoticed, it gets normalized.
Two more guides are landing later this month, rounding out the series to four.
Before You Hire, Aim asks a question that sounds obvious but rarely gets a real answer: before you build a hiring process, do you actually know what you're aiming at? Most teams skip straight to interviews without ever defining what "good" looks like for the role, and unaimed processes fail at a rate of 40 to 82 percent. The guide lays out a simple framework, what to measure, how to measure it, and the real-world constraints you're working within, plus a job analysis model for pulling those answers out of the people who already know the role best.
Funnel Math answers a different question: once you know what you're hiring for, how many candidates do you actually need to fill a class on time? Class-based hiring turns "find good people" into "find enough good people by a date," and that shift turns hiring into arithmetic. The guide breaks down the equation, the two ways a class misses its target, too few candidates versus too slow a process, and why tracking needs to run well past Day 1, since most early quits happen within the first 90 days.
This is a series, not a one-off. We're working through the Playbook section by section, and Before You Hire, Aim and Funnel Math is just what's coming next. If there's a piece of the hiring puzzle you want us to tackle after that, tell us. We're building this list based on what TA and ops teams actually ask us about.
In the meantime, if you want the full picture (all the research, the worksheets, and the case studies these guides are pulled from), the first edition of The BPO Hiring Playbook has it all in one place.