"We Optimize for Speed and Pray for Quality"

What does BPO hiring actually optimize for?

Speed. Quality becomes someone else’s problem.

If you've ever felt like hiring is a guessing game, this one is for you.

We sat down with Daniel Ash, CEO and co-founder of Journeyfront, an intelligent hiring platform built specifically for BPOs, for an episode of Build a Better BPO. Journeyfront is built for BPOs operating in 50+ countries, and Daniel and his team have spent years working directly inside BPO hiring processes across dozens of clients globally.1

That matters, because what he shared wasn't theory or a consultant's framework built in a boardroom. It was pattern recognition from someone who has seen what's happening on the ground, across geographies, company sizes and client types. He described what most BPO hiring processes look like in practice:

He wasn't being harsh. He was naming something most of us already know is true but haven't said out loud.

Is high early attrition a leadership failure?

No. It is a systems failure: accountability ends when the class is filled.

BPOs face herculean hiring challenges. The pressure to fill a full class by Monday is real. The recruiter managing evergreen reqs across multiple clients, role types and hiring timelines is doing an impossible job. When accountability is measured by "did you fill the class," quality becomes someone else's problem, and that someone else usually doesn't show up until two months later, when the attrition numbers come back. So speed wins every time.

The uncomfortable part is that Daniel shared that at many BPOs, roughly half of hires are gone within six months.1 That's not a retention problem. That's a coin flip. And the industry has largely accepted it. It built classes around it, staffed around it, and layered gamification programs and pizza parties on top of it, anything but look at the source.

Are hiring and retention two problems or one?

One system, which almost every BPO runs as two departments.

What struck us most in the conversation was how Daniel framed hiring and retention as two parts of the same system, and how almost every BPO treats them as separate departments with separate problems. Retention gets the ping-pong table. Hiring gets the pressure to move fast. Nobody asks whether the person was a fit to begin with.

Daniel also shared something unexpected: some of the things BPO hiring teams trust most, such as resume experience, phone screens and years in the industry, are often not correlated with job performance. In some cases they're negatively correlated. The candidates recruiters are most excited about aren't always the ones who stay and perform.

That's not a knock on the recruiting team. It's what happens when a system hasn't been designed to learn from its own outcomes. It is the same structural blind spot that shows up everywhere authority and accountability are misaligned.

What fixes the hiring coin flip?

Structure: decide what good looks like, then check it against how people actually perform.

That means deciding up front what good looks like, building consistent criteria, and using assessments validated against your own data, so you close the loop between who you hired and how they performed. Do that, and the coin flip starts to look like a strategy.

The full episode goes deeper on all of it: the real cost of a bad hire, what great assessments measure, how AI is changing hiring and where BPOs should still be skeptical, and what a closed-loop hiring system looks like in practice.