The Quality Paradox: Why BPOs Need Different Screening for Every Client (And How to Make It Scalable)

If you’ve been incredibly fortunate, you’ve never worked in a dysfunctional team or organization scarred by conflict (or conflict avoidance). For the rest of us, it’s more a matter of what type of dysfunction we’ve had to work with. These dysfunctions can tend to boil down to four general cultures/behaviors of dysfunctional workplaces and teams that we’ll call: willful blindness, cold tensions, skirmishes, and active warfare.

There seems to be a current trend among employers to offer more unique and diverse office perks in the hopes of attracting and retaining talent. While perks can be fun and bring momentary happiness, they do not meaningfully move the needle on employee satisfaction or retention. One such example was highlighted by Payscale’s list of employee tenure at Fortune 500 companies, which denotes that Google, a company that offers top-notch perks, has a median employee tenure of 1.1 years.

Being in the business world, it's likely we're all familiar with Pearson's Law, which states: "When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates."  The idea that tracking performance ultimately yields better results is a common-sense proposition at this point.

There are a lot of things that need to go right for a new hire to eventually become a top performer. In most cases, employees typically don’t check every single box you’re looking for, but there are a select few that come very close. Maybe even a handful that check all your boxes. Once you find those unicorns, it’s imperative that you hang on to them. Every company is different, but it might be awhile until you find another! 

The ability to manage and lead people is often thought of as an inherent trait that all individuals possess. This is not the case, as shown by Gallup’s State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders. Gallup conducted a comprehensive study based on 2.5 million teams and managers around the world, and their results showed that only 10% of working people possess the talent to be a great manager.

Jim Collins said, “The most important decisions business people make are not what decisions, but who decisions.” If 80% of your turnover is the result of bad hiring decisions, the most important thing you can do to decrease employee turnover is to focus on hiring people more likely to stay.

When it comes to retaining top talent, it's important to understand the true drivers behind why high performing and satisfied employees ultimately decide to go another direction. In the modern HR world, many would say that optimizing employee engagement is the way to go, when in reality, the research shows there are more important things we should be looking at to retain top performers. 

The technology giant, Google, is known for hiring the best talent in the market and equally known for their wacky interview questions. For years, Google interviewers used these seemingly random questions to "help" them hire great talent. Turns out though, these questions didn't help at all. 

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time,” Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google, told the New York Times. “They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

Every company has and uses a predictive hiring system—whether they know it or not. Let's elaborate on a concrete definition of what a predictive hiring system is...