Creating BPO-Ready Talent Through Readiness Assessment.

In a nutshell, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is the delegation of one or more IT-intensive business processes to an external provider. This external provider owns, administrates and manages the selected processes based on defined and measurable performance metrics. This makes BPO functions critical to an organization’s operational success.

For BPO firms, readiness refers to how well a functional team can adapt to changing market needs and still achieve their performance targets. While BPOs have initially had roots in manufacturing, they have eventually spread out and taken over other essential functions of a business. The early 2000s saw a surge in customer support based BPOs, but today, BPOs are not just limited to working on customer support. BPOs, today, can serve several critical aspects of business operations including -

• Payroll and accounting
• Administration
• Customer support
• IT management and services
• Manufacturing
• Marketing
• Research
• Sales
• Shipping and logistics

With companies outsourcing large and rather critical functions to BPOs, it is important to evaluate the readiness quotient of a BPO to understand their degree of preparedness and the skills and capabilities of their talent pool.

Why is a BPO readiness quotient important?

A BPO readiness quotient is an essential factor that not only helps BPOs improve their performance, but also tells them about gaps in skills. Let’s understand how this works.

Digital transformation and digital maturity have become an essential goal for any organization. More and more business functions are being transformed by integrating AI automation and machine learning to eliminate manual work processes. That refers to digital transformation. The second prong of this exercise is digital maturity,

Does your talent pool have the capabilities to keep up with the dynamic and fast paced changes in technology? Insights into problem areas can help talent development managers analyze, design and build training programs to bridge these skills gaps.

So, what are the parameters that are measured by a BPO readiness assessment? 

While it is important to gauge a talent pool’s capabilities based on their knowledge and technical skills, it is equally important to focus on assessments at a holistic level in order to determine skill gaps and areas of improvements at the grassroots. Let’s understand parameters that help assess BPO readiness.

Types of BPO readiness assessments

1. Knowledge-based

Theoretical knowledge is an important performance indicator as it tests a candidate’s ability to grasp concepts. Essentially, a knowledge-based assessment will evaluate a candidate’s current knowledge base as well as their textbook learning. Such a test will not only confirm remembered knowledge but will allow the use of a clear evaluation criteria. Candidates will be asked to perform specific tasks in the field of cognitive knowledge and skills to understand how well they can retain learned information. It will also provide insights into a candidate’s capabilities to absorb and apply those learnings.

2. Skill-based

Skill based parameters are designed to test a candidate’s technical knowledge, skills and hands-on application in a real-world simulation. Such an assessment will help talent acquisition and talent development teams identify skill gaps and areas that require immediate improvement. For instance, while testing a candidate’s technical skills, it is important to provide them with tests that have real life project scenarios with the required project assessment infrastructure to accurately evaluate their capabilities.

3. Competency-based

A candidate can have excellent knowledge retention and knowledge application capabilities, but it is also important to assess whether those skills are relevant to the functions of an ongoing or upcoming project. For instance, if a candidate has excellent front-end development skills but is only so-so at back-end coding, their skills might not be relevant to a project that requires back-end support.

4. Behavioral assessments

Because a lot of BPO based work is customer or client facing, it is very important to evaluate a candidate’s temperament and ability to work in high pressure situations. Psychometric personality evaluations like PAI, FIRO-B, NEO PI-R, 16PF, GPP-I can help determine if a candidate is a good fit for a project. These tests will tell the assessor of typical behavioural traits of a candidate determining their temperament, confidence level, ability to remain calm, ability to lead people and processes etc.

5. Soft skills/Situational assessment

While having excellent knowledge and hands-on skills is a requirement for project readiness, it is also important to evaluate the soft skills of a candidate to understand how they will function in a project environment. Soft skills are a broad category of abilities that aren't easily quantified. A soft skills assessment test will help an assessor to identify social attitudes and communication skills. These skills include emotional intelligence and conflict management and are usually critical to forging and maintaining strong and healthy relationships with clients as well as coworkers.

6. Communication/English

With one in four people speaking English, it is no surprise that English has become a universally accepted and used language. It is essential for employees, especially those required to possess customer-facing role-based skills, to be well-versed with business-level English communication.  

Assessing BPO readiness with iMocha

Two important factors contribute to determining BPO readiness - the need for new talent and the need to develop and hone the skills of existing talent. Both can be achieved with iMocha assessments and evaluations. Let’s understand how iMocha’s range of assessments resources can help an organization determine their BPO readiness quotient.

iMocha’s range of resources include:

• Talent acquisition solution for hiring
• Talent development with iMocha Skill Validation Solution
  • Pull Solution for Adaptive learning
  • Push solution for business focus
• iMocha projects for determining project readiness
• Skills Library
• AI-EnglishPro for business English assessment

1. Talent Acquisition solution for effective hiring

iMocha’s Talent Acquisition Solution helps organizations efficiently fill open job roles with the best quality talent while creating a top-class candidate experience and reducing the hire time by 35%.
Organizations are given access to the world’s largest skills library with a wide variety of assessments to test and accurately determine a candidate’s capabilities. With features like live coding interviews, live whiteboarding, etc., iMocha’s Talent Acquisition Solution is an ideal hiring assessment for organizations looking at campus hiring, fresher hiring, diversity hiring as well as employee onboarding. Click here to know more about iMocha Talent Acquisition Solution.

2. Talent Development with iMocha Skill Validation Solution

iMocha Skill Validation Solution is the ideal assessment solution for organizations looking to hone the skills of existing talent. The approach here is to develop a data-driven learning ecosystem and use it to scale. This assessment uses Push and Pull strategies to enhance talent development. Let’s understand each solution briefly.

• Push Solution for Business Focus: Focused on business goals and objectives, the Push assessment technique under iMocha Skill Validation solution offers insights on the upskilling or reskilling needs of an organization in alignment with their business objectives. This assessment conducts a skill gap analysis, conducts objective TNI/TNA, baseline skill proficiency and benchmark skills to offer insights into areas of improvement for an organization’s talent pool. Essentially, this solution will help evaluate the training effectiveness and quantify ROI on talent development programs. Based on the insights generated through this assessment, talent development teams can design new upskilling programs or revisit and recreate existing reskilling programs.

• Pull Solution for Adaptive Learning: The Pull solution empowers talent pools to take ownership of their learning journey, validate their skills and benchmark their proficiency level. It offers mandatory learning programs that are aligned with business goals. It also offers insights into candidate skill proficiency by taking a proactive approach to learning. Candidates are also offered gratification in terms of certificates and badges that can be showcased on public platforms, thereby boosting their resume.

3. iMocha Projects for determining project readiness

iMocha Projects is a holistic assessment evaluation system that can help organizations test the skill capabilities of their employees and identify areas of competence and areas of improvement. It is a robust solution that can help businesses look beyond the realm of algorithms and syntax to evaluate an employee’s hands-on capabilities and provide insights into what it takes to build projects independently. With iMocha Projects assessments, assessors can identify the gaps in hands-on skills and deploy the most competent or skilled employees for projects.

• Large scale evaluations: A scalable cloud-based platform that allows organizations to assess a large number of candidates simultaneously. This works great while evaluating entry-level candidates.
• Actionable insights: Detailed skill intelligence reporting with in-depth skill analytics across a wide range of parameters including skill benchmarking, pre-learning and post-learning training effectiveness.
• Progress reporting: Live output preview window allows developers to easily keep track of their progress and validate the execution of the project.
• Simulated assessments: Coding simulators that can assess code quality and provide a superior assessment experience including iMocha’s patented AI-LogicBox simulation for Enterprise Applications like SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow.
• AI-Logic Box: AI-LogicBox is designed for job roles where performance depends on talent’s logical reasoning ability. It is an artificial intelligence-based “code in the blanks” platform designed to assess programmers' logical and problem-solving skills. It tests algorithmic and analytical coding problems meant to focus on thinking and reasoning abilities.
• Proctoring: Prevent impersonation and ensure integrity of assessments using AI-driven smart proctoring features, strong mechanism to detect cheating instances, cheating intensity & impersonation. This feature also offers:

1. Candidate ID Verification
2. Smart Image Proctoring
3. Smart Video Proctoring
4. Safe Assessment Browser
5. Window & Time Violation
6. IP Address Blocker
7. Email Authentication
8. Q&A Randomization

4. World’s largest skills library

iMocha hosts the world’s largest skills library with over 2500 assessments allowing organizations to quickly and accurately assess the strengths and skill set of candidates that fit their business requirements. This skills library hosts a large variety of assessments including:

1. IT & coding skills with 2500+ skills, 200+ challenges & 35+ programming languages
2. Cloud & Enterprise Application skills AWS, Azure, GCP, SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow
3. Psychometric assessments to measure personality traits with PAI, FIRO-B, NEO PI-R, 16PF, GPP-I
4. Cognitive skills that focus on Associative Memory, Numerical and Reasoning Ability
5. Soft skills including business communication, business etiquettes, Leadership, teamwork etc.
6. Business English skills for Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing with grammar, vocabulary
7. Function-specific skills like digital marketing, project management, customer service, sales
8. Industry-focused skills like IT services, Consulting, Telecommunications, Banking, Insurance

5. CEFR-level AI-driven automation of Business English skill validation

iMocha is not just limited to technical skill assessments. The project assessments have been designed to target various business cases including capstone projects for freshers, critical project deployment for experienced resources, pre-joining program assessments as well as ideathons and hackathons. Each business case offers the assesses a simulated environment with scenarios and question types they are likely to come across in real world operations. iMocha’s assessments take a multidimensional approach to skills testing, with questions that not only test technical skills but also other soft skills that are required while delivering projects. iMocha’s AI-EnglishPro is a CEFR-based Business English Evaluation resource that can help recruiters as well as talent developers assess business English skills in a quick, hassle-free way.

• Holistic evaluation of all four English communication skills: AI-EnglishPro evaluate the four essentials of business English skills, i.e., Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing. It also helps organizations customize assessments to suit their forte of work.
• Training Need Identification: AI-EnglishPro can help an organization objectively quantify English communication skill gaps and identify areas for training talent - at every stage of talent development.
• Global Skill Benchmarking: iMocha AI-EnglishPro incorporates globally recognized English evaluation frameworks and standards including CEFR and Cambridge English Vocabulary Profiling hosting quick and holistic English language tests.
• AI-enabled Automation: Powered with accurate NLP technology and scaled on globally recognized CEFR levels, AI-EnglishPro can successfully curb the risk of human error and biases.
• Skill Reports and in-depth Analytics: A personalized dashboard helps TA and TD managers deep dive into candidate skill areas that are strong and those that might need improvement, so that immediate attention action plans can be worked out in time.
• Smart Cheating Prevention: AI-powered features of Proctoring, Window Violation and IP address blockers monitor the frequency and intensity of cheating attempted by the test taker.
• Role-based Assessments: Organizations can choose from a vast range of already tailor-made and skill-mapped assessments. This streamlines the evaluation process for a variety of job roles including Customer Success Analysts, Digital Marketing Specialist, SEO experts, Salesforce Consultant, Customer Support, Talent Acquisition and Talent Management, Sales Manager and Content Marketing Manager.

To summarize, a BPO readiness assessment with iMocha resources will tell you the following:

• The team’s technical capabilities with respect to textbook and applied knowledge
• The team’s abilities to manage unexpected challenges
• The team’s ability to handle deadlines
• The team’s ability to collaborate with each other
• The team’s hands on skills
• The team’s ability to adapt to new technology
• The team’s ability to communicate with clients as well as other stakeholders

Final Thought

• In today’s dynamically changing tech era, readiness is essential for BPO companies as they can use their readiness quotient as a selling point and leverage their readiness to gain competitive advantage. But knowing your readiness quotient is just the beginning. To truly gain a competitive edge, BPOs must align their digital strategy with their business objectives. This means they need to partner with talent acquisition and talent development teams and build a continually evolving readiness ecosystem. With a practice that consistently evaluates their talent pool and looks at bridging any gaps in technical as well as soft skills, BPOs can deliver better solutions, optimize efficiency, take on newer markets and always keep their customers satisfied.