Are We Getting the Right People for the Job? A Study of English Language Recruitment Assessment Practices in the Business Processing Outsourcing Sector

Abstract

Although the business processing outsourcing (BPO) industry in India and the Philippines is keen to employ good English language communicators, especially to work in call centers dealing with native speaker customers, it is by no means certain that the investments they are making into their language recruitment assessment processes are paying off. Many call centers are reporting recruitment conversion rates as low as 1%. It is further reported that the lack of English language skills is the main reason for rejection. But how exactly are the call centers carrying out their English language recruitment assessments? How effective are the BPO industry’s recruitment assessment tools and practices? This article will report on a study of English language recruitment assessment practices carried out in two multinational companies (MNCs) that have BPO sites in India and the Philippines. One of these MNC sites offers IT and back office support and the other operates a global network of call centers. Research access was granted to their human resource departments to shadow their recruitment language assessment practices, to interview key stakeholders, and to collect and analyze relevant documentation. The study revealed a problematic stakeholder understanding of what to look for in language ability when recruiting staff; it also revealed the problematic use of language assessment tools and practices in terms of validity, reliability, practicality, and fairness. It will be argued in this article that this unfortunate combination may be resulting in unreasonable language assessment “gatekeeping” to BPO industry employment and that the problems being experienced by the BPO industry to recruit enough good speakers of English may reside more in their own practices than in the levels of English of their graduate applicants.