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 -
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.
|
Table of Content |
|
TL;DR
|
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
To summarize, a BPO readiness assessment with iMocha resources will tell you the following: