Kathy Gibson reports – As one of South Africa’s largest business process outsourcing (BPO) providers, CCI faces a perpetual challenge in staffing its contact centres with skilled agents and managers.
Conventional wisdom dictated that the best agents fitted a narrow demographic profile which limited recruitment opportunities.
But CCI realised it had to widen its net if it wanted to grow its operations and turned to a relatively new concept called impact sourcing through a non-profit spin-off, CareerBox.
Today, CCI has turned the status quo on its head: 67% of new placements are women; 73% are black Africans; and 76% are from low-income households.
Lizelle Strydom Pottier, a director of CCI Group and MD of CareerBox, explains that around 10 years ago the industry and CCI itself were going through something of an identity crisis.
“The contact centre industry was changing, becoming more sophisticated and more demanding,” she says. “The database of clients was changing dramatically and we needed to decide where the skills would sit better – in South Africa or offshore in a location like the Philippines.”
Then as now, South Africa had no shortage of people looking for work, but there was doubt about whether they could be skilled up enough to service the clients CCI works with.
Around that time, the Rockefeller Foundation was finalising a study on Africa, the emerging BPO industry, and getting youth ready for future jobs through impact sourcing.
CCI decided to examine the pool of unemployed youth available to it looking not so much for transactional skills, but rather at potential.“What we quickly realised is the individuals that come from disadvantaged or underserved communities often have the best behaviours and skills, but they don’t have the link to opportunities,” Pottier says. “In order to tap this resource we need to create those opportunities.
“We realised we were not going to be able to find the skills we needed, but would have to build them.”
And this is how CareerBox was born: a facility to make impact sourcing a reality by bringing in people from disadvantaged backgrounds and giving them the skills they need to succeed in the BPO industry.
A grant of $1,2-miilion from the Rockefeller Foundation to prove that impact sourcing works gave the new initiative its initial impetus, and CareerBox could get started on growing BPO skills.
“It was initially thought we would need a lengthy training programme to do so many things like changing accents, teaching people computer skills, and more,” Pottier says.
“But what we do is within two to three weeks – we are able to develop people and provide them with the necessary skills that will get them job opportunities.”
She explains that in this time, CareerBox gives students about 70% of the skills they need to work as CCI agents with the final finish provided by CCI once they are placed.
“What CareerBox provides is the sourcing, recruiting, development programmes, and training that creates a pool of candidates that CCI can tap into,” Pottier says.
It’s not just CCI that benefits from the CareerBox programme; anyone looking for a role in the services industry will benefit from the training.
With no marketing other than word of mouth and some social media activity, CareerBox fields around 3 000 applications every month. About 750 of the applicants are accepted for training and a new class begins every Monday morning.
For candidates accepted into the training the chances of employment are high – there is a 90% to 95% placement rate.
“During the two-week or three-week training programme we are preparing people for work in the real world,” says Pottier. “And working in a contact centre is a hard job, so we focus on the proper development of useful skills. During the training we do find that people drop out or are dropped from the course.”
Overall, however, the trainees that come through CareerBox display better retention rates than those employed through traditional recruitment processes.
This may be a result of the way the candidates are selected. Pottier says that CVs are required, but candidates are not judged by them.
“We decided we needed to change our recruitment process and found that a conversation gives better results than the traditional list of skills and certification. Rather, we do one-on-one questions that are appropriate to the candidate’s life experiences.
“We end up with a lot of people joining our programme who would have failed the process if we used conventional methods.”
The personalised recruitment allows for a better understanding of the individual and allows CareerBox to build profiles that determine which training group individuals will join.
The programme has proved to be hugely successful for CCI – and also has massive social impact with about 85% of the young people going through the training the primary breadwinners for their families.
About a third of the candidates have already achieved some form of tertiary qualification, either a degree or diploma, but been unable to find work – sometimes for years.
CCI and CareerBox are helping to change an often-held perception that being a contact centre agent is a poor career choice. Instead, young people are realising that it is a well-paid, challenging, and fulfilling job with a wealth of career advancement opportunities.