Who Are The Best Candidates for Collections?

 

Who are the best candidates for collections?

Well, that’s a loaded question – no one grows up saying ‘I want to be a bill collector when I get a job’, few people find the world of credit management fascinating, most people fall into this industry, getting dragged in from customer service, sales, accounting, legal, or just pure chance.  So it's not like interviewing someone for a widget factory, or a bookkeeping role.  Yes you can talk about 'hard skills' like collection techniques, or licensing, but that's only 10% of the equation.

When interviewing people for roles in our company especially, because we are so different than a traditional collection agency, it’s not always clear cut.  Sure, a resume with relevant experience is great, but there’s so much more than that.  Sometimes having relevant experience is a drawback, depending on the working environment they are coming from – I have seen new team members hired go into culture shock, and fail because no one is putting daily pressure on them, they aren’t plugged into a predictive dialer, or they aren’t in a traditional Waterfall Management structure where they have a cubicle, a tightly defined job with no latitude, and a supervisor in (too) constant contact with them.

For my company and the people that have been successful with us, remaining with our company for eight, ten, twelve, fourteen years, it’s a lot about personality, that is equally important to their previous job experience.  Someone who high-fives me in the interview because we don’t do a process in a useless way, someone who tells me what they enjoy about our rarified industry, someone who is open and honest about previous roles or the challenges of finding a new role that’s a good fit for them personally.

While I don’t do the interviews all the time for our company any more, when I do, here are the things I am looking for when performing an interview.

·         A sense of humor – let’s face it, dealing with consumers and businesses stressed out about their financial position, representing clients that want to augment their cash flow, competing against other collection vendors, and trying to juggle authority and compassion is a lot of hard work.  Having a sense of humor makes everyone more successful, deals with the stress of the work, and makes a better work environment for everyone.  If I can get an honest laugh out of a candidate, it goes a long way.

·         Intelligence – what we do isn’t rocket science, it’s a game of Trivial Pursuit.  What’s the statue of limitations for a service contract in West Virgina?  What provinces can’t be called on Family Day?  If a consumer claims identity theft, what’s the process to verify an account is valid and owing?  Does your client need a stair step report for the last 12 months of assignments, and how are we performing when you look at it?  Someone who is smart can handle all these things, even without a lot of experience.  By speeding through a lot of questions in the interview, and asking for challenging and wide-ranging answers, all while changing topics will help gauge how well someone can think on their feet, articulate their thoughts, and showcase how intelligent they are.

·         Will they fit into our culture? – That’s so hard to accurately gauge in an interview, you can easily test technical knowledge, experience, but measuring their people skills, their work ethic, their ability to self-manage is a challenge, because someone can interview well with the right answers, and then not actually follow what they said when hired.  Some people interview poorly on people skills or work ethic questions because they are stressed in the interview, but turn out to be rock solid and dependable and real team players.  You can try to measure this through discussing past work experiences, and trying to find examples of how they dealt with difficult managers, struggling co-workers, or rigid company structures, but it’s a bit of a gamble.

·         Are they ambitious?  -- I don’t mean ‘crawl over their dead mother to get ahead’ ambitious, I mean do they have goals and ambitions, would they like to learn new things, have they been trying to be better than they were five years ago?  Asking them what they’ve learned as new skills in past roles, about challenges that they rose to the occasion of, failures or gaps they identified and plugged shows ambition and not just following instructions blindly without questioning ‘why are we doing this?’

·         Are they likely to stay? – Someone might have on their resume one position at a company for 15 years, or they might have 15 different jobs in the last 5 years, all of that indicates whether they stayed with a company in the past, and might tell a little bit about their work patterns, but having a conversation about why they left previous roles can indicate whether something disenfranchised them, or if they didn’t meet expectations.  All of this is taken with a grain of salt, someone who failed at one company might be wildly successful at another.  But it’s important to try to find out what might trigger someone leaving, after spending all the effort of hiring, training, and integrating them.

·         Will they be happy? – It’s great to find someone with all the skills and experience in the world, but can they be happy working with you?  Is the salary reasonable to their expectations?  Is the work they are going to be doing fulfilling to them?  Will they enjoy coming into work, or will they resent your company and co-workers shortly after starting?  Again, a hard thing to measure in an interview, but you have to try – ask them what makes them unhappy, ask them what they have enjoyed in previous work, be honest about your work environment and the challenges they will face, and measure how they react.  Not just the words, but the emotion, body language, and tone.

The biggest and most important thing is to have an honest conversation as the interviewer – why do you have a job opening you need filling?  How have people failed in the past?  How can a new person brought into the company succeed, and what challenges could they face?

It’s not about a canned list of things to ask (although a rough checklist is helpful to keep the interview on track), it’s not about weird questions like ‘if you were a fruit, which one would it be’, it’s more about having a real conversation, listening to what they say, and drawing on that to answer the questions between the questions to measure things over than hard skills – soft skills, problem solving, personality, work ethics – that’s what makes a good co-worker, and someone you can rely on.  All the hard skills and technical knowledge isn’t helpful, at least to me, if the person who you hire is a callous jerk who offends their co-workers and clients, and needs constant management to keep them on track.

To be a good collector, at least from my personal experience, is someone who can approach their job with a sense of humor, who can juggle twenty different tasks with shifting priorities, someone who can lift up their co-workers with a joke, or supportive advice, someone who can articulate themselves well, someone with a strong personality and determination to succeed, and someone who can listen to the person on the other end of the phone (or email, or text) and give that person solutions, not steam-roll them into paying through intimidation.

To be a good collector, their personality should match the client or portfolio they are going to work.  Collecting on delinquent and repossessed auto finance debts is very different than  collecting on utilities, or lines of credit used to purchase luxuries, or bank overdrafts.

I recently interviewed someone for a collection role. and we talked a lot – they had represented one of our clients at another competing collection agency, and we were able to discuss the challenges that the client gave us as the client.  We talked about his job prospects and different roles they had applied for before our interview.  We talked about their skills, the work environments they had worked in.  They were gregarious, intelligent, and honest.  Most importantly, we both were laughing through the 30-minute interview.  I offered them a job the next day.

I have always liked doing interviews – I wish I could still do it for everyone that comes into our company, but with office locations all across North America, that’s not practical, but my recent trip to one of my branches to help out with meeting new candidates was really fulfilling, and brought back into focus all the things I have on my ‘secret check list’ when interviewing someone.

Got questions about what makes a good collector?   Drop me a line.

Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data & Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
blair@receivableaccounts.com