Outsourcing Rejection

Culture

from the oh,-the-fun dept

A fun story over at Salon from someone who worked for a call center company that handled job applicant screening phone calls. Basically, a company would put an ad in the paper with a phone number for a job opening, but instead of the phone number leading to the company, a call center rep (pretending to work for the company) would answer the call and walk the caller through a basic questionaire. It took the writer a little while to realize that the main reason companies use a service like this is to outsource the rejection side of the game. Turning people down for a job isn’t such an easy task, so it’s much easier to give it to some distant company. Very clean. While most of the jobs she screened are blue collar, there is a funny bit about her interviews for middle management positions. The callers all assumed that the person they reached on the phone was a receptionist who they didn’t want to waste their time with. Thus, they were noticeably rude at the beginning of the call until they suddenly realized that they were already knee deep into an interview that they’d started by being rude.