Hire call center agents
Call center agents work a steady queue of calls, often against handle-time and quality targets. Hire the wrong people and the queue grows while the agents you have burn out. Optihire Staffing recruits inbound and outbound call center agents for contact centers and businesses that run their own phone teams across the United States.
Contingency Recruitment
You pay a recruitment fee only when a successful candidate is hired, subject to agreed terms.
What a call center agent does
Inbound agents take calls about orders, billing, appointments or support, and follow scripts or knowledge base guidance to resolve them. Outbound agents make calls for sales, collections, surveys or appointment setting. Both log every call in a CRM and work to targets such as handle time, quality scores and schedule adherence.
Agents spend most of the shift on the phone, often back to back, with breaks set by the schedule. The job needs resilience, accuracy with account details and the ability to follow a script while still sounding like a person.
What to screen for
The skills, credentials and habits worth checking before you make an offer.
Voice and pace
Judge it on the screening call: clarity, warmth and how quickly they recover from a question they didn't expect.
Call targets
Ask which targets they worked to, how they performed and how they balanced speed with quality.
Resilience
Ask how they reset after a hostile call. Burnout is a common reason agents leave early, so give candidates an honest picture of the queue.
Outbound rules
Outbound calling is covered by federal and state rules, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and telemarketing laws. Your compliance team sets the scripts, but ask whether candidates have worked under these rules.
Systems and note taking
Ask about the phone systems and CRMs they have used and how they take notes while talking.
How we recruit call center agents
Tell us whether the role is inbound or outbound, the call types, your systems, the hours, the pay range and any targets. We screen every candidate by phone and ask scenario questions based on your calls. If you are building a training class, one brief covers the whole group, and we send shortlists in batches so you can interview in a few blocks and start everyone together.
For holiday sales, enrollment periods or product launches, our seasonal hiring plan explains how far ahead to start, and our guide to the frontline job description helps with the posting. See our customer service recruitment page and our recruitment services.
Interview questions to ask
Open questions that make candidates describe real work. Follow up on anything vague.
What kind of calls did you handle, and roughly how many on a typical shift?
Which targets did you work to, and how did you do against them?
Tell me about the hardest call you have taken. How did you reset afterward?
How do you follow a script without sounding scripted?
What do you do when you don't know the answer to a caller's question?
Hiring call center agents?
Send us the role, the shift and the pay range. You pay a recruitment fee only when a successful candidate is hired, subject to agreed terms.