Finding Great Staff

Only the Best: Recruiting Future Collection Agency Rock Stars

Careers  |  3 min read

A couple weeks ago, we launched a pretty unique kind of recruitment campaign at MetCredit.

The concept: a collection agency job at MetCredit probably isn’t for you.

Let me explain.

Working for MetCredit is something unusual. We offer paid, on-the-job training, a boatload of benefits, flexible hours, supportive management and infinite advancement potential. Top performers earn fantastic income, and tend to stick around for a career. That’s how my own story goes.

But. (And this is a very important “but.”)

Only a select few people have what it takes to be a rock star collector or collections manager at MetCredit. We invest heavily in our new recruits, so mis-hires are costly. When we advertise, we tend to get hundreds of applications, a mere handful of which are selected to begin training. Any that are an ill fit are highly unlikely to make it.

So we don’t want rafts and rafts of applicants. We very much want the right ones.

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The concept (created by our longtime marketing agency partner) is to be brutally upfront about the job’s requirements, and not soft-pedal the benefits. It’s a phenomenal opportunity—for the right person.

The new ads are brutally upfront about the job’s requirements and don’t soft-pedal the benefits.

It’s a phenomenal opportunity
— for the right person.

The agency interviewed our most successful team members, very diverse people, and discovered several common threads. All were individuals with an intense need to prove themselves. They were all well-spoken, logical minded and highly motivated. They thrived on solving problems and helping people.

To these individuals, being told “you can’t do this” is an invitation to prove otherwise.

Hence the campaign taglines:

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“Phone Calls are Stressful” plays on an important aspect of working as a collector. If a candidate is stressed-out or uncomfortable on the phone, it’s not going to work out. 

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The best agents are natural born detectives. They love assembling clues to locate runaway debtors (known in the industry as “skips”) or finding helpful, creative solutions to debt problems. We place ads bearing this tagline on the Puzzles page of city newspapers to be seen by readers attracted by problems in need of solving.

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When an agent initiates a collection call, what happens next is unknown. Some debtors react with resistance, anger, or are hard to deal with. Methodology is an important part of our training, but what’s important is not to be paralyzed by fear of a harsh reaction. The best collectors are hardwired to see every barrier, including a difficult person, as an opportunity. Those are the applicants we want most.

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How do you feel about negotiating? If you’re terrible at it, you probably avoid situations where you must haggle on a price or negotiate a deal. But top candidates for a collection agent position are naturals at negotiating, and use their capabilities to create win-win situations. As with the other criteria, we provide extensive paid training, but the goal is to attract top talent—those natural born negotiators.

When we shared the early concepts with our best employees, they immediately got it. We were onto something here.

Taking it to the next level (which I love to do), we developed a 3-minute quiz to help prospective candidates see if they’ve got the ideal personality profile and skill set.

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Complete it, and you’ll have a pretty good idea if you’re a fit or not.

And although it’s early days, the campaign is working. Our quiz is getting strong traffic, and delivering the best-qualified applicants we’ve seen.

Think you may have what it takes? Find out for yourself in three minutes or less.

Take The Quiz!

Or know someone who meets our criteria?
Send them the link: https://www.metcredit.com/careers/

We love to launch great people into a fun and rewarding career, on a truly supportive team at Canada’s number one national collection agency!

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Brian Summerflet Author: Brian Summerfelt

President and CEO of MetCredit, Canada's top-performing consumer and commercial collection agency

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