How one debt collection management shop filled its staffing shortfall.
 
 
By Adam Robinson
 
 
NorthStar Technologies is in the business of helping companies manage their debt collections. The organization offers a slew of different solutions for companies to collect on past due accounts, loan, card balances, and bad checks. As a primarily people-driven business, they need an in-house team to provide timely service to their clients.
 
 
NorthStar Technologies’ culture is built on hard work and professional development. However, its talent acquisition process and selection capabilities were not enabling the company to keep pace with its high growth rate. The NorthStar leadership team faced a variety of challenges when it came to its hiring process:
 
 
• There wasn’t a designated staff member specifically trained to
hire employees.
• The company lacked a protocol for a structured interview process.
• There wasn’t a procedure for pre- and post-interview follow-up,
which led to little candidate communication.
• Resumes were not organized in one central place.
• Turnover was higher than they wanted to be.
 
 
These roadblocks led to a very time-consuming hiring process. Hours were spent digging through unqualified resumes of candidates in search for a single candidate who showed promise. The management team would also have to dedicate time to writing individual emails to every candidate they were interested in inviting for an interview.Upon completion of the interviewing process, the NorthStar team was still unsure of whom to hire based on their qualifications. They were in need of a solution that would help them select the right person for the job.
 
 
Elevating the Hiring Process
As a collections agency, Northstar was committed to selecting responsible employees for all open positions, so they knew it was time to overhaul their hiring process. They decided to partner with Hireology and implement its selection manager tool for all job families within the organization.
 
 
The first step was to transform the resume collection process. Prior to Hireology, NorthStar was sorting through resumes that were sent to individual email accounts. Hireology revamped the system by providing a hosted career site that would advertise job openings and consolidate candidate resumes. Now, all candidates are housed in one place and accessible by all Northstar users. Northstar was able to lower the cost of their hiring process by making it streamlined and efficient, which freed up valuable time for the organization’s leadership team.
 
 
Northstar also implemented all of Hireology’s pre-screening tools, including the SmartRank™ survey, which screens for candidates who don’t meet the necessary requirements. In addition, they utilized Hireology’s email templates to decrease the amount of time a user needs to respond to a candidate, and an applicant tracking system to effectively compile resumes for organizational storage.
 
 
The NorthStar Technologies team also opted to enlist a suite of background and credit checks, to ensure that they would have the right people working for their organization.
The results have been very positive. “Hireology’s prescreening process has allowed us to cut our time spent in the hiring process by close to 82 percent,” reports Matt Yeager, vice president of the collections company. “The customizable features make interviewing the right candidates quick and easy. Overall the experience of working with the Hireology website and team has been exceptional.”
 
 
The tools that are in place have improved the efficiency and organization of the interview and hiring process. This is evident in the conduction and scoring of the interviews as well as the easy accessible verification services. The company has also reported a significant increase in efficiency and success from the use of the pre-screening tools. They are able to cut their unqualified applicants by 25 percent based on the results of the Hireology SmartRank™ survey.
 

Yeager says that Hireology’s customizable features have made interviewing for the right candidates quick and easy for Northstar, and it now has complete confidence in its hiring model.
 
 
Adam Robinson is CEO of Hireology.

Tags: RPO & Staffing, Talent Acquisition

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