You know that line in your job ads, the one that says “essential: previous contact centre experience”?
It might be costing you half your talent pool.
We recently surveyed over 100 contact centre professionals. People currently in roles, people who’ve built careers in the industry, and people between jobs. The aim was to understand what makes someone succeed in a contact centre.
What we found might make you rethink asking for essential experience when you’re looking to hire great people for your contact centre.
52 out of 105 respondents working in contact centres today didn’t have contact centre experience when they started.
If your job ad said ‘essential: previous contact centre experience’, you’d have screened out half of them before they ever got a chance.
But here’s what’s interesting: the retention gap between experienced and inexperienced hires is tiny.
A 7% difference. Is that worth eliminating half your applicants for?
When we looked at people who came from retail, hospitality, or other customer-facing backgrounds – but had never worked in a contact centre – something jumped out.
75% of them stayed for over a year. That’s better than the overall average.
Our thinking is that these are people who know customers. They’ve dealt with complaints face-to-face. They’ve handled difficult conversations without a script or a mute button. They’ve worked weekends, done shift patterns, and they’ve survived the Christmas rush.
They just haven’t worn a headset yet.
The skills that make someone good at contact centre work aren’t learned in contact centres. They’re learned in every customer-facing environment going. Patience, empathy, and the ability to stay calm when someone’s being unreasonable.
Your “essential experience” filter isn’t protecting you from bad hires. We think it’s just making your job harder by shrinking the pool before you’ve even started.
If it’s not experience, what separates the people who stay from the people who leave?
Onboarding.
When we looked at inexperienced hires specifically, the pattern was stark:
That’s six times higher attrition when you rush people through.
The problem isn’t who you’re hiring. It’s that you’re not giving them time to learn. You’re bringing in someone with transferable skills, then throwing them in the deep end before they’ve figured out your systems, your products, or your way of doing things.
And then when they leave, you blame the hire. “Should’ve stuck with experienced candidates.” we hear you say.
No. We’d suggest you should’ve stuck with proper onboarding.
We’re not saying experience doesn’t matter at all. Someone who’s done the job before will ramp up faster. They’ll need less hand-holding in week one. If you’re under pressure to fill seats yesterday, that’s appealing.
But if you’re thinking longer term (and you should be, because early attrition is expensive) then screening for traits might serve you better than screening for tenure.
The transferable skills that predict success in contact centres aren’t mysterious. They’re communication. Resilience. Empathy. The ability to stay composed under pressure. You can screen for those, you can interview for those., and you can assess for those.
What you can’t do is teach someone to care about customers. That bit’s either there or it isn’t.
Here’s the shift we’d suggest, and that’s to stop treating “no contact centre experience” as a red flag, and start treating “no customer-facing experience” as the filter instead.
Someone who’s spent three years in retail, dealing with the public every day, handling complaints, upselling, hitting targets? They’ve got more relevant experience than you might think. They’ve just been doing it without the headset.
Give them a proper onboarding, not a rushed two-week crash course because Operations need bums on seats, and the data suggests they’ll stick around just as long as anyone else. Maybe longer.
The talent pool is wider than most employers assume. You just have to be willing to look. And we’d suggest you do that by rethinking that essential experience requirement for your contact centre agents.
This is one of seven findings from The Great Contact Centre Survey: our research into what contact centre workers wish employers knew about attracting, hiring, and keeping the right people.
