I.

INTRODUCTION

The subject of this paper is a contact center and a Business Process Outsourcing

(BPO) company that provides an omni channel service and support to a selected group of

companies and its customers. This Company is based in the Philippines, employing over 6,500

members in three major sites located in Manila, Cebu and Roxas City. The Roxas City site was

established in 2017 and is growing with about 750 employees by the third quarter of 2019. This

paper focuses on the Employee Selection department of this BPO company in Roxas City.

In order to provide quality service to clients, the company must make sure that its

number one asset, the employees, are properly trained and well-equipped with the necessary

knowledge about their work. The company must secure that all its employees are productive,

and able to provide the best service to the company’s clients. Thus, the Recruitment and

Employee Selection Departments are a significant part for the acquisition of these qualified

workers. The Recruitment Department focuses on pooling candidates for the customer support

representative position which serve as the workforce of a BPO company, while the Employee

Selection Department focuses on the support positions that cater to the needs of the workforce

in order for them to be more effective in their roles. Examples of these support positions are the

Compensation and Benefits officers, Recruitment Promoters, and Global Communications

Trainer. The Employee Selection team’s role is to look for qualified applicants that will help the

company in its processes outside the workforce or agent functions. The assigned departments

must ensure that they will provide the company the suitable personnel, and ensure that

manpower within the company is enough to sustain the organization’s daily activities.

Achieving the company’s goals would be made easier if the organization will properly

establish and follow the basic management principles. A company that will embrace the

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principles of P-O-L-C (Planning, Organizing Leading and Controlling) framework of

management would be able to ensure that the operations within the organization would be

systematic and organized.

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Objectives

The study aims to analyze the processes and problems of the BPO Company’s

Employee Selection Team.

Specifically, the study aims to:

1. describe the planning, organizing, leading, and controlling processes of the

Employee Selection Team;

2. identify problems and challenges encountered in the processes; and

3. suggest measures to improve the processes and recommend solutions to the

problems encountered.

Significance of the Study

The study highlights the processes and challenges of a BPO company’s Employee

Selection Team. BPO is a key developing industry in the Philippines. According to Dezan Shira

& Associates (2017), the BPO industry contributes 9 percent of the country’s GDP growth and

employs more than a million people. Taking a look at the processes and challenges faced by

BPO companies is important as it will contribute to theory and knowledge that we currently have

over this sector which provides so much for our country.

Results of the study will help the chosen organization to solve the problems identified in

the processes. The company may revisit their processes and policies in place and consider the

recommendations given to revise and improve current practices as necessary.

Findings and recommendations of the study will also benefit the recruitment and human

resource teams of other BPO companies to further advance the processes they currently have.

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Scope and Limitations

This organizational study is limited to the Employee Selection Team of the BPO

Company. It involves the processes and problems faced by the team manager, team supervisor,

and the internal and external Employee Selection officers who are both based in Roxas City.

The study does not include the analysis of processes of the officers in the other locations and of

other departments.

The processes outlined and problems faced that are discussed in this study are limited

to the year ending 2019.

Methodology

This research paper was approached in the aim to apply the theories and principles of

management. The researchers are to discuss the current practices of the Employee Selection

department and identify certain areas of opportunities in the management practice of the

mentioned department and recommend action steps to improve these practices.

In order to achieve this, primary data was collected directly by the researcher through an

interview with one of the Employee Selection Officers of the department in its Roxas City site.

Aside from that, existing data was gathered, such as the organizational chart and flow chart.

The data collected was qualitative, focusing on the process and practices, and did not make use

of the numbers and statistics in the performance of the company department since these facts

were confidential. It is to be noted that the ultimate objective of this paper was to address

practical research problems.

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II. HIGHLIGHTS OF PLANNING, ORGANIZING, LEADING, AND CONTROLLING

Planning

For its planning practices, the Employee Selection Team conducts a meeting every

quarter to set objectives and determine a course of action for achieving those objectives. At the

end of every quarter, the managers and executive managers of the Recruitment and Training

Department gather to review the performance of each sub-department. The Employee Selection

Manager and Supervisor then cascades the result of their evaluation and review down to the

Employee Selection Team on a different meeting.

The team then proceeds to identify the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) for the next

quarter and develop strategies to achieve the objectives set along with the key metrics for

success that will allow the team to control their strategies. After the development of a proposal,

the manager and supervisor present this to the Executive Managers for the Recruitment and

Training Department. The team makes use of a customized Gantt chart that will allow them to

track the progress of each task included in the strategic plan. 

An example of an objective would be to enroll 50% of the workforce population (those

employees in the entry-level positions) to the Leadership Evolution and Advancement Program

(LEAP) of the company. Under that objective are action steps such as setting up a booth in the

company grounds to increase awareness about the program and at the same time provide

easier access to these employees who want to apply for the program. Since this program

requires an initial interview and meeting a certain skill level for company-wide English

assessments, another action step could be to provide additional training to improve the

applicants' scores. These were a few of the action steps that the team was able to come up with

in order to meet the quarterly OKRs. 

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Organizing

After deciding on the objectives and the action steps, the team proceeds to continuously

improving and updating trackers, assessments, hiring processes, and other standard operating

procedures that would help the team keep track of their performance, and therefore control their

plans. 

The department is basically divided into two committees with different responsibilities: 

a. External Employee Selection: Actively pool for, screen, evaluate, and process

applications of qualified candidates to fill the open positions as required by the

business, 

b. Internal Employee Selection: Facilitate the application process for the promotion of

eligible employees, and encourage teammates to be part of the leadership evolution and

advancement program of the company for them to have access to certification and

online classes.

The team follows the following organizational chart, where the Employee Selection

Manager oversees the whole team, assisted by the Employee Selection Supervisor. In the

Roxas City site, the Employee Selection Officers are then divided into two committees, one

handles external applications, and another team handles internal applications. The internal

applications officers are further given tasks that either focus on promotion or growth of

employees, or the enrollment and completion of LEAP employees. For other sites of the

company, a separate LEAP officer is needed because of the quantity of candidates to be

enrolled in LEAP, as well as to keep track of each LEAP teammate’s progress and eligibility for

promotion. In the case of the company’s Roxas City site though, the responsibilities of a LEAP

officer are executed by the Internal Employee Selection Officer since this site is relatively

smaller compared to other sites. There is only one Employee Selection Manager and one

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Supervisor for all three sites. Under them are the Employee Selection Officers, two officers in

Roxas City, three in Cebu, and four in Manila. 

Table 1. Organizational Chart of the Employee Selection Team.

The organizational chart for Cebu and Manila differs a little bit as compared to Roxas

City’s, because of the change in delegation of tasks, since each Employee Selection officer

handles internal and external applications because of multiple BPO accounts that these sites

handle. 

Leading

With regards to decision making limitations, the Employee Selection manager has the

final say in every major decision that has to be made. The supervisor is given authority to

decide if the manager is unavailable. Although, as the touchpoint of the company's applicants,

the officers' inputs are highly valued, and are usually tasked to prepare proposals. Other times,

the team practices a democratic way of coming to a decision by votation. 

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Troubleshoot procedure

Officers are given limited authority to find solutions on their own, since they are usually

oriented and knowledgeable with the considerations, the proper verbiage, and/or the extent of

their jurisdiction. If a problem is deemed too difficult to solve, the officer should pend it as much

as he can until the supervisor or manager becomes available. 

The officers communicate with each other using the software Skype aside from emails

and mobile phone. Weekly meetings (Wednesdays), which are presided by the ES Manager,

are held as well. To keep track of each employee’s growth and performance, the manager also

conducts semi-annual reviews with each employee, which will affect the performance bonus of

the employee. The company also makes use of bonuses, awards and incentives to motivate

their employees.

Controlling

The Employee Selection team makes use of the chart that contains the time frame for

each task as the standard for performance. There is an ideal start date and end date, and an

actual start date and end date. The team does little to establish performance standards,

compare actual performance against standards, and take corrective action. 

On the other hand, there are reports that each officer submits weekly for documentation

purposes. The evaluation of quarterly performance will occur at the end of the quarter and so,

coming up with corrective actions will be included and executed in the next quarter.

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P a g e 9 | 21
III. ANALYSIS

Problems and Challenges

1. No formal structure and process for hiring

Employee recruitment is a very crucial and important part of achieving the company’s

goals. With limited manpower in an organization, desired objectives may not be achieved and

can cause delays in the necessary activities of the company. It is the responsibility of the

recruitment team to secure the positions needed to be filled-up at a given time frame. With

qualified and competent employees, the company will be able to meet its goals.

There are problems and concerns identified in the Recruitment and Training Department

of the BPO company being studied. These concerns are vital in the recruitment process and

need to be resolved in order to address the issue of the company on manpower recruitment.

a. The company has a flowchart for the hiring process which starts with the forecasting of

job vacancies up to the endorsement of the hired employees to its designated

department. There is, however, no detailed manual on the hiring process including the

team responsible for the specific task and the timeframe for each step of the process.

The company has a difficulty in deploying new employees because it does not have a

detailed flow of activity within the recruitment section.

The company identifies the overall flowchart of the hiring process but the specific details

of the hiring process such as the requirements and items required are lacking. There are

no manuals and standards that recruitment employees could use in order to hasten the

hiring process. Well-defined standards and goals are very important in an organization

for employees to act efficiently and achieve the desired output.

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 b. Most of the external applicants are not from the Roxas City. The job applicants are from

out of town and although the company has brand activations in key areas of the Visayas

region, the schedule of these brand activations is dependent not on the employee

selection committee, but on the recruitment for agents committee. In addition, the

availability of the hiring manager for final interview must also be considered since the

hiring managers are not always readily available. These factors make the process of

hiring new employees difficult and causes delays in deployment and not meeting the

OKRs of the Employee Selection Team.

c. There are available positions in the company that are intended for internal applications.

However, these positions were not filled for a long period already and the hiring process

for these positions are still on hold.  What usually causes this delay is the eligibility of the

applicant for promotion. Applicants must be part of the LEAP and have to certified from

certain online classes as well as pass assessments, all of which depends on the position

they are applying for.

Mentioned are the concerns and issues that need to be resolved by the company’s

Recruitment and Hiring Department. These problems all lead to the same effect – it causes

delays and possible non-attainment of the company’s objectives and goals due to lack of

manpower needed in the specified areas and periods. The identified root cause of these issues

is the lack of a well-defined standard for recruitment of employees (internal and external hiring).

The hiring process does not include defined procedures to be followed by the recruitment and

selection officers of the company.

The planning stage of any organization plays a critical part in the achievement of the

company’s goals and objectives. Thus, it is vital for the company to finalize and ensure that all

processes and activities within the team are well-defined and structured.

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 2. No formalized standards for the performance of the Employee Selection Team

In the planning stage, the company sets the number of jobs to fill for each quarter.

Currently, the company’s control process is merely to compare the number of planned hires to

actual hires at the end of the quarter. If the number is not reached, it will be part of the Objective

and Key Results (OKR) tasks of the team for the next quarter. If the number is reached, no

further action is warranted.

The lack of formalized standards for assessing the team’s performance would be

detrimental to the company. As the old saying in business goes, “If you can’t measure it, you

can’t improve it”. Merely comparing the number of planned hires to actual hires is not a good

measurement of the officers’ performance. The company should also take into consideration

other factors such as the competence of people hired, the quality of hiring services rendered,

and adherence to company policies and procedures. If there are no standards for performance

in employees’ roles, they will not know what is expected of them, and therefore simply will not

know what justifies excellent versus poor performance.

A lack of proper planning and performance standards for employees may lead to unfair

and subjective results in comparing their expected and actual performance. Without

performance data to back up the appraisal, there is no way to determine what is true – the

manager could provide information about performance that is either false or misleading. If an

employee performs well and then feels that he/she was assessed unfairly, there’s little

motivation left for him/her to stay with the company [ CITATION Rot19 \l 1033 ].

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 3. Poor communication between managers and employees.

The company’s employees have different work schedules. The company’s Employee

Selection Manager is based in Manila and reports to work from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am. The

Employee Selection Supervisor, also based in Manila, has a flexible work schedule but normally

reports from 3:00 pm to 12:00 am. The shift of the two Employee Selection Officers in Roxas

also varies. The internal officer works from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am, while the external officer works

from 1:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

Table 2. Work Schedules of the Employee Selection Team.

Employee Selection Team

Work Superviso Internal External
Schedule Manager r Officer Officer

1:00 PM  
2:00 PM  
3:00 PM    
4:00 PM    
5:00 PM    
6:00 PM    
7:00 PM    
8:00 PM    
9:00 PM      Common time: 9:00
  pm – 10:00 pm  
10:00 PM      
11:00 PM      
12:00 AM    
1:00 AM    
2:00 AM    
3:00 AM    
4:00 AM    
5:00 AM    
6:00 AM

The difference in work schedules causes an interruption in workflow that does not exist

when everyone works the same or similar schedules. The officers have a window of only one

hour with the manager and seven hours with the supervisor. Although the officers have a certain

degree of leeway to act on pressing concerns, they still need to obtain approval from either the

manager or the supervisor. Officers need to pend difficult problems as much as they can until

the manager or supervisor becomes available. Also, any issues and concerns not

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communicated within the allotted window will have to wait for the next working day. This results

in delays in addressing urgent issues and deciding on the best course of action between

alternatives.

Due to difference in work locations and schedules, the Employee Selection Team

primarily communicates through emails, Skype messaging, and mobile phones. Email and

intranet are faceless communication channels. Especially when having a difficult message to

share, one of the biggest challenges to effective communication in the workplace is stepping out

and speaking to people face-to-face [ CITATION Cha18 \l 1033 ].

Weekly meetings are difficult to schedule given that the team has a window of only one

hour (9:00 pm to 10:00 pm) every day. One hour is too short a time to give updates, much less

to discuss any major issues encountered and to resolve them. A common practice of the officers

is to extend working hours to 10:00 pm onwards for meetings or tasks. This causes not only

additional cost to the company as they need to compensate the officers with overtime pay but

also may lead to stress of employees for needing to work beyond their regular schedule.

In addition to the poor communication within the Employee Selection Team, there is also

the lack of proper communication with the hiring managers of each department with a vacant

position to fill. Aside from providing a job description and minimum requirements for vacant

positions, the company has no formal standards on the selection of applicants. The applicants’

resume is checked and used to screen applicants who meet the required qualifications. The

final decision, however, rests upon the hiring manager. The process by which the hiring

manager selects the most qualified applicant/s for the job is not formally documented and

communicated. There is no proper communication in terms of the standards set.

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Intervention

1. No formal structure and process for hiring

The company provides a brief description or flow of the hiring process, but it does not

provide the standard including the time frame for each part of the hiring process. Time-bound

goals and activities are essential in every company. It is important to a provide a timeline to

ensure that the objectives and targets will be met. The recruitment team must secure and

prepare a standard and manual for its hiring process. 

Planning and structuring the hiring process is a tedious job. Formulating the necessary

steps and requirements for the standard and manual to be effective takes a lot of time and

dedication. However, once it is done, it will provide a clear process and will eliminate confusion

by the staff and management. Proper planning and structuring of the process in the recruitment

department will lead to a systematic flow of activity. It will result to reduction and/or possible

elimination of redundant and unnecessary activities in the process. 

Issues on the delay of hiring new employees is primarily caused by 1) applicants are not

located in the same area and 2) interviewing managers are not readily available, the company

should take advantage of technology to solve these problems.  Modern technology makes the

life of people easier as it comes with numerous tools that improve communications, both for

personal and business aspects. High-speed broadband connections and online applications like

Skype, Microsoft Teams, Viber, etc. have paved the way not just for people to get in touch with

each other for socializing, but it has also enabled companies to recruit the best talent and

employees outside the area of jurisdiction of the company.

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 With the modern way of communicating, the company should use the available online

communication tools to interview job applicants. With this, it is not necessary for the applicants

to be physically present during the interview. It would answer the concerns between the

mismatch of the schedule of the applicant and hiring manager and, likewise, the distance

between the applicant from the location of the company.

Technology could also hasten the processing of the necessary documents for the

application. These possible alternatives should be adopted by the Company to solve the current

issues. These new ideas must be documented and secured in the manual and standard for

future references and proper guidance of employees.

2. No formalized standards for the performance of the Employee Selection Team

One simple, powerful way to immediately elevate the quality and consistency of

employee performance throughout an organization is to create a set of performance standards –

a concrete set of expectations to which every employee is held accountable [ CITATION

Rot19 \l 1033 ].

The company should formulate the standards of performance for its officers and should

not merely compare the planned number of hires to the actual These performance standards

should be effectively communicated to the employees. At the end of the period, the employees’

actual performance should be compared to the standards set.

Performance standards should be objective, measurable, realistic, and stated clearly in

writing. The standards should be written in terms of specific measures that will be used to

appraise performance. In order to develop specific measurers, the company must first

determine the general measures that are important for each element.

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 According to Alvarez (2016), general measures used to measure employee performance

of recruitment and selection teams include the following:

1. Number of qualified candidates per post

2. Recruitment timeline

3. Number of interviews per candidate

4. Job offer timeline

5. Acceptance rate

These company should set specific, quantifiable measures for these five general

measures to objectively assess the employees at the end of the period. Employee feedback is

very important as it allows employees to improve their performance. It is also a way to grant

employees that performed well incentives to further motivate them.

In recruitment and selection, measuring the success of the recruitment and selection

initiatives is not as simple as looking whether the employees are capable of getting new hires

for every vacant position. Recruitment is an investment. Therefore, the company needs to

determine if the recruitment strategies are worth it. This is where performance standards come

in.

3. Poor communication between managers and employees

Given the nature of the BPO industry here in the Philippines where employees need to

work late night shifts to be in sync with American time zone, changing the employees’ work

schedules, say from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm, is not possible. The Employee Selection Team must

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work an evening or late-night shift in order to attend meetings, conference calls, etc. Another

consideration is that the External Employee Selection Officer cannot work the same time as the

manager and the internal officer (9:00 pm to 6:00 am) since part of the job is to interview

external applicants. These applicants need to be interviewed in the daytime and will no longer

be available in the evening.

Other things being equal, people will communicate most frequently to those

geographically closest to them, even within a relatively small organization [ CITATION Jac59 \l

1033 ]. Thus, spatial distance itself can be a barrier to communication. Since the Employee

Selection Manager and Supervisor are located in Manila and the officers are located in Roxas

City, they merely communicate through emails and Skype/mobile messages. This may pose

less problems if the employees have the same work schedules. The problem with distance and

different shifts causes unnecessary delays in problem solving and decision making.

To solve these existing problems, a possible solution is to assign an Employee Selection

Supervisor in Roxas City to bridge the gap in distance and communication. The company must

perform a cost-benefit analysis if hiring a separate supervisor for each site is indeed beneficial

to the company considering the additional salaries to be paid. If the company will not be able to

do this, an alternative would be to delegate additional authority to the officers so they will not

merely wait for the final say of the manager/supervisor before acting on an urgent issue.

Another recommendation is to change the work schedules of the employees and make

sure there is sufficient available time for them to discuss issues and concerns.

Given the missteps in management communication, the company needs to advance

ways of creating awareness and to forge management policies that foster good and effective

communication in the company. The positive impact of good communications at work includes

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better business performance, higher productivity and improved customer service, as well as

higher staff retention numbers and lower costs of staff turnover.

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IV. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION

In conclusion, being a relatively new pioneer company in the city of Roxas, the employee

selection department still has a few steps to take to further improve the management practices

observed in order to achieve maximum results. After gathering and analyzing data, the

researchers were able to come up with recommendations focusing on the planning and leading

function of the management. There were problems identified in each core function of

management, but the researchers were able to determine the core interventions that were

needed to primarily address the underlying problems for each concern.

For the planning function, there was a need to establish standards and metrics for

success for each objective in order for the team to control and compare performance and

execution of their strategic plan. At the same time, the standards that the team agrees upon

must be applied in the controlling and execution of the strategic development plan. This

intervention will eventually lead to effectively developing a controlling method and allow the

team to execute corrective measures timely whenever it is necessary. The researchers also

recommend that there be a detailed and documented manual on the hiring process including the

team responsible for the specific task and the timeframe for each step of the process. There

should also be an ideal timeframe for the whole hiring process with the possible causes of

delays already considered. The company should also make use of an online tracker for each

applicant aside from the excel file, in order for the officers to be more efficient in updating and

keeping track of each applicant’s progress.

Aside from these, the researchers also recommend that the leading function of the

department be improved in terms of the communication between officers and their superiors so

as to be more calibrated with one another. The researchers recommend that a supervisor must

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be assigned in each site, align the employees work schedules or empower the officers by giving

them a sense of authority, to avoid delays in problem solving and decision making.

In the end, the findings and recommendations that the researchers were able to develop

will not only allow the management to maximize its resources, and help the organization

become more profitable. These will also allow each member of the team to function properly

and become more motivated as part of the employee selection team because they will be able

to monitor their efforts, correct their actions timely, and see the fruits of their labor. The function

of the manager is therefore more than the efficiency and efficacy of its department and its

organization. He also becomes a leader and influencer that his employees will look up to.

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