Trials of an innovative new technology that measures a user’s psychometric ability through voice have revealed that it can halve attrition rates and is proving particularly applicable to volume recruitment for contact centres.

BrainGauge, developed by National ICT Australia (NICTA), Australia’s information and communications technology research institution, measures and monitors the mental effort introduced by a task by picking up on the nuances in a person’s voice signal patterns.

When an individual feels overloaded by complex tasks and under pressure, they have less control over their voice muscles and this shows in their speech.
Researcher Bo Yin told Recruiter that real-time monitoring within the technology indicates this ’overloading’ and can therefore assess the maximum level an individual can handle using specific skills.

“Talent managers told us that it is often very difficult to test for competencies such as service quality and retention, due to the limitations of the conventional aptitude assessments,” said Yin.

“Traditional aptitude assessments usually look at the end result that candidates have arrived at but don’t necessarily test the processes by which they got to them. There are process-driven assessments in the marketplace, such as electroencephalography, but they are very costly to deploy and are obtrusive, requiring individual calibration.”

BrainGauge is accessed via the internet as software-as-a-service and the only other equipment a candidate requires are headphones and a microphone. An assessment session typically lasts 10 minutes, during which time a candidate completes four interactive tests and responses are transmitted back to the BrainGauge server for assessment.

Among those organisations which have taken part in trials is a leading contact centre managed by a Fortune 500 company. A group of 191 freshly hired agents were put through the BrainGauge assessment and a recommendation of ’likely fit’ or ’probably unfit’ was given. Over a 12-week period, the attrition rate was halved.
In other trials, staff turnover in a 1,500-seat call centre in Australia dropped by 13%.

BrainGauge’s existing tests are solely based on voice but Yin said NICTA is working to utilise more behavioural signals, such as those revealed by mouse and keyboard activities. “We believe the combination of multiple behavioural signals will provide even more reliable assessment results targeting a greater variety of job roles,” he explained. He added that NICTA is constantly in discussion with organisational psychologists and recruitment professionals to further develop its solutions and would be interested in engaging with recruitment service providers.

www.braingauge.com.au