How Focus Services standardized global CSR hiring with Testlify

Focus Services is a global business process outsourcing (BPO) provider that delivers customer support and contact center services for enterprise clients. As new client programs launch, the company must rapidly hire large volumes of customer service representatives while maintaining consistent quality across locations.

Every new program is a hiring surge that has to stay consistent

Screening at that speed while keeping the bar identical across markets is where quality usually slips. A screen that is fast but inconsistent passes the wrong agents; one that is rigorous but slow makes Focus Services miss its launch commitments to clients.

Focus Services needed a way to measure English and real communication for every CSR candidate that could accelerate with the business instead of buckling under it, and hold the same standard whether a program was staffing up in one market or several at once.

Test the job the way an agent actually does it

Focus Services standardized its CSR screening on Testlify and, because a contact-center role is a spoken one, it tests speaking directly rather than inferring it from a written score:

• English to the CEFR standard. A recognized bar rather than a subjective read, so candidates are comparable across every market at once.
• Typing, listening, and verbal reasoning. The practical skills a live queue actually demands, tested alongside language.
• Spoken answers, AI-scored. Across 55,000+ responses, thousands are audio and video answers scored with voice-AI and video-AI, so a recruiter hears and sees how a candidate handles a customer before advancing them, not after the first shift.

Hiring that grew 80% while quality held

Focus Services invited 1300+ candidates in its latest hiring cycle, with 1,099 completing the assessment, an 83% completion rate, even as candidate volume grew 80% year over year. That combination is the point: it scaled throughput without the screening process becoming a bottleneck or compromising hiring quality.

Recruiters get a consistent, spoken-first read on every CSR candidate, in every market, so a new program launches at the same quality bar as the last rather than at whatever standard the hiring rush allowed.

Supporting growth without compromising quality

As hiring demand continues to grow, Focus Services relies on the same structured assessment process to evaluate every customer support candidate consistently. This enables the company to scale recruitment while maintaining the quality standards expected by its clients.