Wipro BPO and MeritTrac demonstrate Process Innovations in Spoken English Evaluations

Bangalore, August 5, 2007: Wipro BPO, one of the leading BPO services company in India and MeritTrac Services, India’s Largest Skills Assessment Company announced the success of their partnership in redefining voice evaluation processes and deploying it for mass recruitment drives over the path breaking telephonic delivery platform.

With a charter of hiring over 2000 people every month at Wipro BPO, there was a need for a robust, scalable evaluation methodology that would eliminate subjectivity in hiring. Improving the quality of hires and minimizing waste through early attrition were the principal drives behind this engagement.

Based on the widely-deployed “MeritTrac’s Spoken English Test” framework that measures a candidate’s spoken English skills on parameters like Grammar, Accent Neutrality, Fluency and Voice clarity, a project was rolled out to customize the tool to Wipro BPO’s requirement. The scoring grid was customized to each process to define the hiring threshold – thereby creating an auto redeployment framework. Wipro BPO adopted the innovative telephonic mode of evaluations from MeritTrac, pioneering the next wave in conducting voice evaluations.

This telephonic mode of evaluations pave the way for best practices in spoken English assessments, providing clear audit trails with the recording of all voice evaluation clips. The evaluation process buckets candidates into straight hires and trainable categories, based on the test performance and improved conversion rates. The evaluation framework also highlights specific inputs for training, especially on recognition of fatal errors in grammar and accents, thereby creating a link between the recruitment and training departments. For Wipro BPO the evaluations were carried out from multiple cities/ locations across the country addressing scale-up for large-volume hiring.

Since the start of the project, around 35,000 candidates have been evaluated till date by Wipro BPO using the MeritTrac platform.

T. K. Kurien, CEO, Wipro BPO said, “Our objective is to move to a ‘hands-free’ recruiting process. We see this as the first step towards achieving that. The scoring grids and the storage of the voice clips provide us valuable information to select the right talent for the right process. Right hiring is the first and the most important step towards reducing attrition – which is the bane of our industry today”.

Madan Padaki, Co-founder & CEO, MeritTrac Services added “It has been a pleasure working with Wipro BPO who has shown immense faith in MeritTrac to adopt this innovative practice. We studied various processes of Wipro BPO and customized our assessment frameworks to meet their requirements. This success underlines MeritTrac’s expertise in understanding the entire recruitment methodology for the BPO sector and providing appropriate solutions. We are sure that the success of this engagement will provide an impetus for a wide-spread adoption of this methodology across the BPO sector”.

About MeritTrac: MeritTrac(tm) is India's Largest Skills Assessment Company. MeritTrac designs and delivers assessments to evaluate abilities, skills and knowledge for both corporate & individual customers. Since its inception in 2000, MeritTrac has assessed over 2 million candidates for over 150 clients across 75 cities pan-India for industry verticals like IT, BPO, BFSI, Engineering, FMCG, Healthcare, Retail, Education, Manufacturing & PSUs among others. MeritTrac is neither a Placement/Recruitment agency nor a Training firm, and is uniquely positioned as an "Independent" assessment company that provides quantitative inputs on the talent pool and helps in measuring competencies for specific roles. Its suite of scientifically designed assessments is used by corporates for pre-recruitment/employee assessments and by individuals for measuring their skills for employability. MeritTrac's expert test development team has generated over 75000 questions across 300 areas spanning Communication Skills (English & other Indian Languages), General Abilities, Domains Skills (Technologies, Engineering, Accounting, etc.) and Psychometrics. All tests can be delivered in both online and offline modes under supervision. Online tests are delivered using OnTrac-a proprietary web-based testing engine. The company counts some of the world's most admired & respected companies like ABB, Accenture, Aricent, Cholamandalam DBS, Cognizant, Google, HAL, Honeywell, HP, HSBC GLT, IBM, ICICI Bank, ICICI Prudential, ITC, Microsoft, MindTree, NSE, SAP Labs, Satyam, TESCO, Wipro and Wockhardt amongst its clients. A Manipal Education Group (MEG) investee company, Bangalore-based MeritTrac has 450+ employees and 1000+ certified test administrators operating out of offices in all the metros.