I recently had a conversation with a Director of Talent Acquisition at a mid-sized BPO that left me frustrated on her behalf.
She was trying to hire 150 customer service agents across three different client accounts with different language requirements, different performance benchmarks, and different start dates. Her ATS, built for corporate recruiting, kept treating each role as a separate requisition. She was drowning in administrative work, manually tracking which candidates belonged to which "hiring class," and using spreadsheets to manage screening requirements that varied by client.
"I feel like I'm fighting my own tools," she told me.
She's not alone. BPOs operate in a fundamentally different hiring model than traditional corporate environments, yet most are using ATS platforms designed for companies hiring one role at a time.
Here's the reality: BPOs hire different. And if your ATS doesn't understand that, it's costing you time, money, and quite possibly your next client contract.
When a traditional company needs to hire a software engineer, they open one requisition, fill one role, and onboard one person. The process is linear and individualized.
BPOs don't have that luxury.
When a BPO wins a new client contract or experiences seasonal volume spikes, they need to hire 50, 100, sometimes 200 agents simultaneously—all starting on the same day, all going through the same training program, all needing to meet the same client performance standards.
This isn't 200 individual hiring decisions. It's one strategic cohort that needs to be recruited, screened, and onboarded as a unified group.
Traditional ATS platforms don't have a concept of 'hiring classes.' Instead, they offer two bad options:
Option 1: One evergreen requisition for all candidates
Option 2: Create separate requisitions for each cohort
The BPO reality: You're not hiring individuals. You're building hiring classes that need to start together, train together, and perform together. But traditional ATS platforms force you to manage cohorts in spreadsheets outside the system—or create administrative chaos with duplicate requisitions.
In corporate hiring, quality standards are internal. The hiring manager decides what "good" looks like based on company culture, team dynamics, and role requirements.
In BPO hiring, quality isn't optional—it's contractual.
Your clients specify exactly what they need:
Miss these benchmarks, and you're not just dealing with a bad hire. You're facing contract penalties, client dissatisfaction, and potentially losing the account entirely.
According to research from Salem Solutions, commercial contact centers face contractual penalties ranging from 10-20% of payment schedules when SLA metrics aren't met. These aren't soft costs—they're direct hits to your bottom line within the same reporting period.
The BPO reality: Quality isn't about "culture fit." It's about meeting measurable, client-mandated performance standards that directly impact your revenue.
Here's where it gets complex.
A corporate recruiter might have 3-5 different roles to fill at any given time, each with its own set of requirements. Once those requirements are defined, they stay relatively stable.
BPOs are managing dozens of active hiring classes simultaneously, each with different screening "recipes" based on:
And here's the kicker: these requirements change constantly as you win new clients, lose old ones, or adapt to shifting market demands.
The BPO reality: You need a system that lets you "dial in" different combinations of assessments, screening criteria, and quality benchmarks for each hiring class—while still maintaining apples-to-apples data across your entire organization.
Most ATS platforms were designed for corporate recruiting. They're optimized for:
When you try to use these systems for BPO hiring, you end up with:
The Cohort Management Gap: BPOs typically use evergreen requisitions—one ongoing job posting per position and client (like "Customer Service Agent - Client A"). When you need to hire a class of 50 agents starting December 15th, those 50 candidates all come from the same evergreen req. But traditional ATS platforms have no concept of "hiring classes" or "cohorts" within that req. Every candidate is lumped into one undifferentiated pool. You can't tag candidates as "December Class A" or "January Class B." You can't track cohort-specific start dates, training groups, or performance metrics. So recruiters end up managing hiring classes in spreadsheets outside the ATS—tracking which 50 candidates out of 650 total applicants belong to which cohort, which start date, which client account. The ATS becomes a candidate database, not a cohort management tool.
Data Fragmentation: Because traditional ATS platforms don't support cohort tracking, you can't aggregate data to identify patterns across hiring classes. You can't answer questions like "What screening combination produces the best 90-day retention across all our customer service roles?" or "Which sourcing channels perform better for healthcare clients vs. e-commerce clients?" Your hiring data lives in spreadsheets, disconnected from your ATS, making it impossible to optimize your process based on what actually works.
The Multi-Client Blind Spot: Traditional ATS platforms weren't built for managing multiple clients within a single system. You can't easily organize candidates by client account, generate client-specific hiring reports, or customize screening workflows for different client SLAs. Some BPOs try to work around this by creating separate requisitions for each client ("CSR - Client A," "CSR - Client B"), but then you're managing dozens of nearly-identical job postings, and candidates apply to the wrong one. Others use custom fields and tagging, but that requires extensive manual data entry and doesn't solve the reporting problem.
Customization Costs: Want to adapt an enterprise ATS to support BPO cohort hiring, multi-client management, and client-specific screening? Prepare for expensive customization projects, ongoing maintenance costs, and the constant risk that system updates will break your custom workflows. As one BPO leader told me, "The cost to make iCIMS do what we need is ridiculous." Enterprise systems offer extensive features, but customizing them for BPO-specific workflows often becomes prohibitively expensive—especially when you're operating on thin margins.
Lack of Client-Facing Reporting: Your clients want to see hiring metrics specific to their account: how many candidates are in the pipeline, time-to-fill for their roles, and quality measures for agents hired for their program. Generic ATS platforms don't have built-in capabilities for client-facing reporting. You end up pulling data manually, building reports in Excel, and emailing them to clients—when what you really need is a system where clients can log in and see their hiring dashboard in real time.
The good news? BPOs don't have to choose between expensive enterprise complexity and limited SMB functionality.
Purpose-built BPO hiring platforms are designed around how you actually work:
Cohort Management: Create one hiring class that encompasses 200 agents, manage them as a unified group, track progress toward start-date goals, and maintain individual candidate data within that cohort structure.
Client-Specific Screening Recipes: Build customized assessment combinations for each client account. Need CEFR scores for European clients but not for U.S. clients? No problem. Want to add a tech-savviness assessment for one client's troubleshooting role? You can dial that in without affecting other hiring classes.
Unified Data with Flexibility: Maintain standardized data collection across all hiring classes so you can identify what works. Which screening combinations predict 90-day retention? Which sourcing channels produce the highest-quality candidates? You need apples-to-apples data even when requirements vary by client.
Client-Facing Reporting: Generate reports specific to each client account showing hiring progress, quality metrics, and performance benchmarks. Your clients can see that you're meeting their SLAs without accessing your entire system.
Take Everise, for example. They went from a 12-day time-to-hire to same-day hiring after implementing a BPO-specific platform—without sacrificing quality or overwhelming their recruiting team with administrative work.
BPOs operate in a unique hiring environment with unique challenges:
If your ATS was built for corporate recruiting, it's forcing you to work around its limitations instead of supporting how you actually hire.
The question isn't whether BPOs hire differently. They obviously do.
The question is: when will your hiring technology catch up?
Ready to see what BPO-specific hiring technology looks like? Schedule a demo to learn how Journeyfront supports cohort hiring, client-specific screening, and unified data management—without the administrative nightmare.