Hiring people to take high school call-ins, build simple summaries

We've had some success in the hiring process by making sure folks take no fewer than three practice calls before they start. That way you can see how they are on the other end of the phone as opposed to sitting in the office.

And Drip's suggestion that they get a contact number from every call they take will prove to be solid gold on at least three Friday nights this fall.

 

Well, I can bang out a 15-inch gamer on deadline, with minimal typos, in 15 minutes. Don't know how that stacks up with your skills, but it beats anybody I've been around.

Typing is all about getting the brain and the hands wired together with the keyboard. After a while, and I've been doing this for 27 years, it becomes second nature.

Your point about the Quark shortcuts, though, is well-taken.

 

True: We pay (starting) call-takers $20 a night for about 3 hours' work. We had a new call-taker come in for a few nights, then called to complain about her first check. She thought she was getting $20 a hour.

 

What a letdown! $20 for three hours sounds about right, although I know a few places that pay more --- and some that don't pay anything at all.

When I started I got $25 per game in the field and that would be 3-4 hours, including travel time. Plus I had to buy my own gas and food/drink.

 

There's no getting around the fact it's going to be hit and miss with newcomers. No matter what the age, some are going to be bright and motivated and others are not. Usually you can figure out which is which after a couple of weeks of work.

 

I'm pretty sure we're paying $10/hour to the phoners. We have 4-5 of them.

 

What's McDonald's paying these days?

I made like $3.25 an hour flipping burgers back in the day (long time ago), but that much could actually BUY a burger with change left over back then.

 

Here's another rule. Teach them phone etiquette. Sometimes, kids can get a bit unruly talking to others. Be professional.

 

Child labor laws? How young is the person?

Makes me wonder. I was mowing lawns for money when I was 13. Is there any difference between that and sitting at a desk taking phone calls?
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Yes. You were self-employed.

(Or, in my case, paternally employed. I think my first paying job was reshingling a roof at age 10.)

 

I might have told this story on another thread once, but it bears repeating here as a cautionary tale about what happens when your part-time/call-in people aren't properly prepared:

Long time ago, my first newspaper job, I worked for a 50-something SE in a two-person sports department. One Friday afternoon during football season the managing editor brings us this woman who had approached the paper about doing some photo freelancing. She tells SE she's interested in whatever other work there is and he tells her we can someone to answer phones on Friday nights. Next thing I know, here's this woman sitting in the office on that very Friday night taking a football game on the phone.

She clearly had not been trained properly, which I realized very quickly when I started reading the recap she turned in and it didn't make any sense. So I went to her to sit and go over it -- with the clock ticking -- and found out how clueless she was. She didn't understand what she was writing. But it gets worse. The paper ran a list of football scores on A-1 of the Saturday paper. We had already given the score list to the copy desk, they had sent A-1 and the plates had been burned. And the score of the game this woman took was wrong. She had so little understanding of what she was doing that she had the wrong team winning the game. And they had to remake A-1 as a result.

You've still got time these next few weeks to bring people in and have them do a dry run to avert these sorts of problems. Do yourself a favor and take the time to do that.

 

Hacker made a great point. We live in an imperfect world yet we expect perfection. Mistakes happen. The key is to minimize them. On the job training is tough and nothing simulates a wild Friday night during high school football season than a wild Friday night. Be patient and communicate with the young ones. They are the future (if there is one) of this industry.

 

Geesh. There's a horror story that haunts our newsroom of the former SE who hired a girl out of college who claimed she knew everything about sports during her interview, but after she was hired and covered her first game, she flat out knew nothing. Going through our archives and reading her stories, it was pretty obvious that was the case. Eventually she transferred to news, where, quite frankly, she wasn't any better.

With scrimmages coming up, I think I might bring this kid out to cover one or two so he can get a feel for what it's like before the real deal begins in a couple weeks.