High-Volume Customer Service Recruiting Support and Onboarding Compliance

Business Challenge

High-Volume Hiring and Onboarding Compliance to Ensure Contract Safety

As a leading American outsourcing company, our client provides business process services to government health and human services agencies across the globe. They urgently needed to hire and onboard 1,000 call center representatives — including bilingual representatives — within an extremely short time period to meet a timeline set by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) contract they had recently been awarded. The opportunity called for streamlined hiring initiatives across the country.

Our client needed a staffing partner who could quickly provide a high volume of candidates while complying with prevailing wage and fringe pay requirements for each location. The ideal partner also needed substantial resources and tracking protocols to ensure adherence to state and local government laws and regulations.

If our client couldn’t meet the aggressive hiring and onboarding timeline and adhere to the wage compliance requirements, they would be in jeopardy of losing a contract worth up to $525 million and putting their long-standing relationship with the CDC at risk.

Due to our five-year strategic partnership with this client and our standing as the top vendor in their program, the client turned to Aston Carter for help meeting the aggressive hiring timeline and the compliance requirements necessary to fulfill their contract obligations.

Our Solution

Maintaining Compliance Amid High-Volume Call Center Ramp Efforts

Efficient high-volume recruiting coordination was a major priority for the project, so Aston Carter immediately identified a team of 70 recruiters and recruiting managers who specialize in placing customer support positions, dedicating them solely to focus on this recruiting effort.

Project coordination and support was needed across five states (MO, IA, MN, WI and IL), and because remote work would only be in place for the first few weeks, we geographically aligned our recruiting teams to each of the client site locations so they could easily tap into their established networks of locally based talent.

The recruiting effort required 20% of the call center representative candidates to be bilingual. Our recruiters were also challenged to recruit candidates with the at-home capabilities needed to work on this assignment, including their own equipment and the ability to download the programs needed to work effectively. Sourcing candidates with a very specific type of computer equipment and software personally available to them was critical to the project, as the client would be unable to provide personal workstations in time for the start dates.

To accommodate the personal workstation requirement, we created a specialized training program called Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). The program ensured that all call center representatives had the tools and knowledge needed to provide top-notch customer service aligned with our client’s performance metrics.

Under the direction of our strategic account executive, who serves as this client's national point of contact, and in coordination with our marketplace directors, we leveraged our recruiting bandwidth and corporate support teams to hire 200 contractors within six days of our client’s initial requisition. Because of our rapid recruiting support, the client asked us to help fill another 500 positions in two weeks, which we successfully were able to do.

To facilitate tracking throughout the hiring initiative, we submitted all candidates through our client’s preferred VMS in compliance with their roster deadline. We worked with our corporate compliance team to ensure all candidates were set up with the correct prevailing wage and fringe benefits requirements required for their city and state location.