Call Centre Recruitment: How to Hire, Onboard and Keep Contact Centre Staff
In 2023, a panel of Australian contact centre leaders sat down at the Red Energy contact centre in Melbourne to work through the hardest problem in the industry: nobody could find people.
Three years on, the problem has inverted. Hiring volumes have halved. Too many applications is now a bigger headache than too few. And yet contact centres are still losing a quarter of their frontline every year, for reasons that haven't changed at all.
The advice that came out of that room has aged remarkably well. The market it was given in has not. Here's both — the framework, and what the 2026 data says you should do differently.
457 → 223
Average frontline hires per contact centre, 2024 to 2026. Hiring volumes have more than halved in two years.
26% vs 9%
Too many applications is now a bigger recruitment problem than too few. The job changed from finding to filtering.
43%
of talent acquisition teams have no recruiter dedicated to contact centre roles. Specialist roles, generalist hands.
ℹ️ Where this came from
This guide began life as the Q&A from the ACXPA Victoria launch event, hosted at the Red Energy contact centre in Cremorne, Melbourne. The panel was Sarah Young (Manager, Customer Contact Solutions, Red Energy), James Witcombe (Director, Smaart Recruitment — and author of Australia's leading contact centre benchmarking study), Sharon Hoffman (Talent Acquisition Lead, Probe Group) and Fazra Caleel (Organisation Design & Capability Consultant, City of Casey).
We've kept their framework because it still holds. Everything marked 2026 is new — drawn from the 2026 Australian Contact Centre Best Practice Report, and in several places it directly contradicts the assumptions everyone in that room was working from.
The Recruitment Problem Has Inverted
Every question asked in that room in 2023 assumed a candidate drought. How do we attract talent? How do we make hiring managers sell the role? What have you tried that actually worked?
That was the right question then. It is close to the wrong question now.
The single most important number in the 2026 recruitment data
26% of contact centres now say a high volume of applications is a problem. Only 9% say a low volume is.
Read that again, because it reverses the entire premise of the last five years. The industry spent half a decade learning how to attract candidates. The skill it needs now is how to filter them — quickly, fairly, and without pushing the good ones out of the process while you wade through the rest.
Two forces are doing this. Retention has genuinely improved, so fewer seats fall vacant. And AI and self-service are absorbing a wider range of contacts, which means structural demand for frontline agents may keep contracting rather than bouncing back.
Which sets up the uncomfortable finding: 43% of talent acquisition teams have no recruiter dedicated to contact centre roles at all. Generalists are filling specialist roles in a high-complexity environment, at exactly the moment the job got harder — and it shows up in quality, in speed, and in the experience the candidate has of you.
If you're looking at AI to help with the filtering problem, that's a reasonable instinct — but do it with your eyes open. We've covered where AI genuinely helps in call centre recruitment and where it quietly creates liability.
How to Make Contact Centre Recruitment More Successful
The panel's framework split the problem into three pillars. It's held up — but read it now as a quality framework rather than a volume one. Every item below is worth more when you have too many applicants than when you have too few.
Recruitment
Give your recruitment team notice. The shorter the time to fill, the more pressure they're under — and pressure is paid for in quality. A compressed timeline doesn't produce a faster hire; it produces a worse one, six weeks later, twice.
Make the job ad stand out, in your own voice. Use language that reflects your brand. At this stage you're not trying to attract everyone — you're trying to attract people who align with you, and repel the ones who don't. With applications now running too high, an ad that filters is worth more than an ad that broadcasts.
Put frontline team members in the assessment process. They know better than anyone what the job actually requires, and they'll set honest expectations with a candidate in a way no hiring manager can.
Set expectations clearly and accurately. A gap between what was promised and what the job is remains one of the biggest drivers of early attrition. You can win a candidate by overselling. You cannot keep them that way.
Training
Let people come up the curve at their own pace. A safe learning environment removes the pressure to perform before they're ready — and it's usually the difference between someone who stays and someone who quietly decides in week three that this isn't for them.
Use step targets across the first 90–120 days so competence builds against realistic milestones instead of being demanded on day one.
Give them a buddy. Someone to show them the ropes and, more importantly, teach them the culture — which is not in any manual.
Let them practise while they're still learning. Hands-on time during classroom training layers the learning and consolidates it. Theory alone evaporates the moment a real customer is on the line.
Fast-track it with knowledge management. This was a footnote in 2023. In 2026, 95% of senior leaders rate knowledge management as important or very important — it's now core infrastructure, not a nice-to-have.
Leadership
Get new starters in front of their team leader early. The relationship that keeps someone in the job is almost always with their direct leader. Start building it before day one if you can.
Weekly check-ins — to track progress and, crucially, to catch expectation gaps while they're still small enough to close.
Run cross-functional feedback sessions between recruitment, training and operations. These three functions each hold a different piece of why a hire worked or didn't, and in most organisations they never compare notes.
Measure and review your exit data. Conduct the interviews. Actually read them. Then change something. Exit data that goes into a folder is a cost, not an asset.
None of this happens if your team leaders don't have room in the day — and most of them don't.
Onboarding: Where the Hire Is Actually Won or Lost
The original question from the floor was blunt: what percentage of people drop off during induction, and what stops it?
17% of new starters left within the first three months — and in larger contact centres, as high as 30%.
Onboarding retention is now the strongest recorded in seven years, and frontline attrition overall has fallen to 25% from 29%. The industry has genuinely got better at this. It's one of the few unambiguous wins in the data.
The mechanism the panel described is the one that worked, and it's worth restating plainly:
Successful recruitment is not about filling a seat in training
Treat the first 90 to 120 days as the onboarding period — not the first week. In that window the new recruit is learning your culture and your ways of working, not just your systems. The goal at the end of it is a competent and confident employee who feels connected to your organisation. Anything less and you've hired a resignation with a delayed start date.
The trap is that onboarding is usually owned by the training team and ends at graduation, while retention is measured by operations and starts there. Nobody owns the seam. That seam is where your 17% used to disappear.
If you want to quantify what each of those early exits actually costs you, the true cost to replace a contact centre agent is almost always higher than people assume — and it is the number that unlocks the budget for fixing the seam.
Why People Leave — and What Actually Works
The panel's answer to "how do you keep people engaged when they're looking around?" was uncomfortably simple: the things that stop someone looking around are the same things that would have kept them engaged in the first place. There is no separate retention lever you pull at the last minute.
Outside of money, most decisions to leave come down to people not feeling seen, heard and valued. Here's the 2026 ranking of why they go, and what to do about each.
Salary — 49% (down from 57%)
Still the number one reason, but falling fast as a share. Pay enough to take money off the table. If you genuinely can't move on salary — and many can't — then increase the variety and complexity of the work instead. People are motivated by meaningful work, and it's a real counterbalance when the pay band is fixed.
Check yourself against the Australian call centre salary benchmarks before you assume you're competitive. Most people who think they're paying market rate haven't looked in two years.
Career change — and it's rising
The 2026 report is explicit: career development and the desire to pursue a different path are both growing as reasons to leave, even as salary declines. Which means paying more will not fix your attrition on its own.
Provide clear pathways into other roles. Make sure people know exactly what's required to get there. And where there are prerequisites, coach them toward the capability — then help them apply and interview. The report's own conclusion: the industry needs to do more than pay competitively; it needs to invest in where people go next.
Leadership
People don't leave contact centres, they leave team leaders. Invest in the relationship, and invest in the capability — through formal training, mentoring and coaching.
Worth pairing with psychological safety: if people can't raise a problem without consequence, you will never hear about the reason they're leaving until the exit interview.
Lack of flexibility
Offer working from home. Offer shift swapping. Give people some control over how work fits around their life.
This was straightforward advice in 2023. In 2026 it has become the most dangerous item on the list — for reasons the next section covers.
Five things that build an engaged workplace
The panel's practical list, unchanged, because it's still right:
- Ask your teams regularly what their pain points actually are.
- Set a rhythm to review those pain points — and involve the team in the solutions.
- Build an internal network of stakeholders who can help you fix them: HR, IT, Marketing.
- Run skip-level interviews — a meeting between a team and their one-over leader, covering what's working, what isn't, and giving the team a safe mechanism to give feedback about their own leader.
- Communicate the progress relentlessly. There is no such thing as over-communicating on engagement.
And once you've asked, take action. Asking a team what's wrong and then doing nothing is measurably worse than never asking. If you want the tactical layer, we've collected ideas to enhance employee engagement in a contact centre and what actually retains call centre employees.
The Flexibility Warning
This is the one place where following the 2023 advice will not be enough, because the ground has moved underneath it.
Flexibility is being withdrawn at the exact moment it's still driving exits
Lack of flexibility remains one of the top reasons frontline agents leave. And yet full flexibility has fallen to its lowest recorded level, while "no flexibility" is climbing.
The 2026 report's warning is direct: contact centres that remove remote work options without addressing the retention consequences may find the cost appearing in their attrition data sooner than expected.
To be fair to the industry, more than half the contact centre workforce is still working remotely on any given day — which, set against the return-to-office push from major corporates and government, is genuinely notable. The decline has been gradual, not a snap-back.
But the direction of travel is one way. If you are tightening the policy, tighten it with a retention plan attached, and know what each departure is going to cost you before you sign it off.
Need help with the hiring, the filtering or the onboarding?
Independent, vendor-agnostic listings — recruitment specialists, assessment tools and onboarding training providers.
For Candidates: How to Land the Job
The other half of the room that night was people who want one of these jobs. If that's you — and given applications are now running high, the bar has gone up — here's what the panel said actually works.
Use your network
Do you know anyone at the organisation? Talk to them. Find out what they look for in candidates and what would make you stand out. A referral moves you past the filter that's now rejecting most of the pile.
Tailor your resume
Every job is different, so every resume you send should be too. Make it achievement-based, and match it to the specific criteria in the ad — not the criteria in the last one you applied for.
Tailor your cover letter
A well-written cover letter is one of the few remaining ways to stand out — it shows off your writing, which is now a core channel skill, and lets you say why you want this job specifically.
Be brave — pick up the phone
Don't wait for them to come to you. Find the right contact and call. Prepare three questions first so you don't freeze — and choose questions that demonstrate both your interest and your skills.
Two things worth reading before you apply: the customer service keywords that actually get a resume through, and the skills employers are really screening for. And if you're wondering whether it's a job worth having — here's the honest case for it.
From the Event
The ACXPA Victoria launch, held at the Red Energy contact centre in Cremorne — a multi-award-winning ~300-seat operation — combined a site tour with the panel discussion that produced everything above.
Highlights from the night — the Red Energy contact centre tour, the panel discussion and the networking that followed.
ACXPA Victoria launch event at the Red Energy contact centre, Cremorne.
James Witcombe presenting some fascinating insights into recruitment in contact centres in 2023.
James Witcombe's presentation that night became the data spine of what ACXPA publishes today — Smaart Recruitment authors the Australian Contact Centre Best Practice Report, and ACXPA has contributed the mystery shopping chapter to every edition since 2020. The numbers throughout this article come from the current one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is call centre recruitment so difficult?
It used to be difficult because there weren't enough candidates. In 2026 it's difficult for the opposite reason — 26% of contact centres now report too many applications as a problem, against just 9% reporting too few. Add the fact that 43% of talent acquisition teams have nobody who specialises in contact centre roles, and the average recruiter is carrying 23 open vacancies, and you get a filtering problem being solved by people who don't have the time or the specialist knowledge to filter well. The difficulty has moved from the top of the funnel to the middle of it.
What percentage of new call centre hires leave during induction?
Historically around 17% left within the first three months, rising to as high as 30% in larger contact centres. The good news is that this has genuinely improved: onboarding retention in 2026 is the strongest recorded in seven years, and overall frontline attrition has fallen to 25% from 29%. The organisations that fixed it did so by treating onboarding as a 90–120 day process rather than a training course with a graduation date.
How long should call centre onboarding take?
Plan for 90 to 120 days, not two weeks. Systems training is the fast part; culture, confidence and competence are not. Use step targets across that window so people build capability against realistic milestones, give them a buddy, and get them in front of their team leader as early as possible. The measure of success at the end isn't whether they can operate the software — it's whether they're competent, confident and feel connected to the organisation.
What is the number one reason call centre agents leave?
Salary, cited by 49% of leavers in 2026 — though that's fallen sharply from 57% the year before. What's rising is more interesting: career development and the desire to pursue a different path. The implication is that pay alone will no longer fix your attrition. Contact centres that offer visible pathways to somewhere else within the organisation retain people that competitively-paid ones without those pathways do not.
Is removing work-from-home going to hurt retention?
The 2026 data says be careful. Lack of flexibility remains a top reason agents leave, and yet full flexibility has dropped to 11% — its lowest ever recorded level — while "no flexibility" has climbed to 13%. More than half the workforce is still remote on any given day, so the industry hasn't snapped back. But the report's warning is explicit: contact centres that withdraw remote options without a retention plan attached may find the cost turning up in their attrition figures sooner than expected. Model what each departure costs you before you change the policy, not after.
Should you use AI to screen call centre applications?
With applications now running high, the pull toward automated screening is obvious and largely reasonable — but the governance matters. Screening tools inherit whatever bias is in the data they learned from, and "the algorithm did it" is not a defence you want to test. Used well, AI is excellent at the mechanical parts (scheduling, initial knock-out criteria, structuring the pile). Used badly, it quietly filters out the people you most needed to see. We've set out where the line sits in using AI in recruitment for call centres.
Where to Next
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Summary
The framework that came out of that room in 2023 — recruitment, training, leadership; a 90–120 day onboarding window; ask your people what's wrong and then actually fix it — has aged well. Every item on it is still worth doing.
What's changed is the market it sits in. Hiring volumes have more than halved. Too many applications is now a bigger problem than too few. Onboarding retention is the best it's been in seven years. And salary, while still the top reason people leave, is fading against career development.
Which leaves the industry with a genuinely different job to the one it thought it had: not attracting people, but choosing them well, onboarding them properly, and giving them somewhere to go next. And doing all that while quietly withdrawing the flexibility that was keeping a fair number of them there.
