Character-Based Hiring in Contact Centers: Why Who You Hire Matters More Than How Many
Gary Hale, Co-Founder & CEO
Contact center hiring has traditionally been a volume problem: how do you recruit enough agents quickly enough to fill the queue? The implicit assumption is that agents are relatively interchangeable — that with adequate training, most candidates can be brought to acceptable performance levels. That assumption is demonstrably wrong.
What Character Actually Means in a Contact Center Context
Character in a contact center context is a specific set of observable qualities: genuine curiosity about the customer's situation, authentic patience with frustration and complexity, the resilience to deliver consistent quality interaction after interaction without degradation, and the intrinsic motivation to resolve issues completely rather than just close the ticket. These qualities are not reliably developed through training. They are either present in a candidate or they are not.
Why Empathy Can't Be Trained Into People Who Don't Have It
Empathy training produces marginal improvements in agents who have the underlying disposition. It produces negligible results in agents who don't. This is the central insight behind Mpathic's hiring philosophy: recruit for character, aptitude, and experience — in that order. Character determines the ceiling of what an agent can become. Aptitude determines how quickly they develop. Experience is the most replaceable variable.
The Measurable Impact of Character-Based Hiring
When 400+ agents were onboarded for the New York State Department of Labor in 2020, first call resolution reached 92% against an industry average of 54%. Transfer rates dropped from 60% to 6%. Customer responses included 'I want to hug you!' and 'There's no way you guys work for the government!' In a head-to-head comparison with an internal IT help desk team, Mpathic's character-selected agents closed 139% more cases, earned 84% more CSATs, and delivered 173% more same-day resolutions.
Retention as the Other Side of the Equation
Agents who were hired because of their genuine service orientation tend to find their work more meaningful, experience higher engagement, and build stronger team relationships — all of which correlate with lower attrition. The most important hiring decision in a contact center is not which candidates have the most experience. It's which candidates have the character to make every customer interaction a genuine expression of care.
Frequently asked questions
How do you assess character in contact center hiring?+
Character assessment relies primarily on behavioral interviewing — asking candidates to describe specific past situations that reveal how they responded under stress, how they handled a customer they couldn't satisfy, and how they describe the satisfaction they get from helping people. Situational scenarios assess judgment. Reference conversations focused on how the candidate treated people complete the picture.
Is character-based hiring slower and more expensive than traditional volume hiring?+
It is typically slower in the sourcing and selection phase because character assessment requires more human judgment. But it is less expensive on a total-cost basis because character-aligned hires have lower attrition, reach full performance faster, and require less remediation and supervision than misaligned hires.
Can character-based hiring scale to large contact center programs?+
Yes — with the right infrastructure. Scaling character-based hiring requires clear definitions of the traits you're selecting for, structured behavioral interview protocols applied consistently, trained hiring managers, and sourcing strategies that identify candidate pools with higher character trait concentration.
What is the relationship between agent character and customer satisfaction?+
Research consistently shows that the emotional quality of the service interaction — whether the customer felt heard, respected, and genuinely helped — is at least as important as the technical resolution in determining satisfaction. CSAT scores are, in a meaningful sense, a measurement of the character quality of the agents customers encountered.
How does Mpathic's hiring philosophy differ from typical contact center recruiting?+
Most contact center recruiting prioritizes availability, speed, and cost. Mpathic's model prioritizes character first — specifically seeking candidates who demonstrate genuine empathy, service orientation, and resilience — then assesses aptitude, and treats experience as the most trainable variable.
