Submitted on Mon 17 Aug 2026
According to the ACXPA Australian Contact Centre Industry Best Practice Report, average attrition across Australian contact centres sits at 27%. That is roughly one in four agents walking out the door every year.
Zoom into larger operations, and it gets worse. Centres with 500 to 1,000 seats sit at 43.4% attrition. Those with over 1,000 seats sit at 43.1%. Even smaller centres under 50 agents are not immune, recording 20.3% attrition.
The same report names the top reason agents leave: financial reasons, specifically better pay, cited by 51% of departing agents. That figure has grown for three consecutive years.
This is not a people problem. It is a process problem, and it starts before day one. It is also why a growing number of contact centres are turning to a recruitment process outsourcing Australia provider to fix hiring at the source, instead of patching it after the fact.
The Problem Starts Before Day 1
The ACXPA report shows 12-month retention across Australian contact centres sits at just 69%, and 6-month retention at 77%. Nearly one in three agents is gone within their first year. Nearly one in four has already left before completing six months.
The cost of recruiting, training and losing that person gets written off as normal. It should not be. It is the direct result of a hiring process that was never built to identify the right people in the first place.
You Are Not Hiring the Wrong People. You Are Screening for the Wrong Things.
Most contact centres screen for communication skills, typing speed, and basic customer service experience. Reasonable on the surface.
But what actually predicts whether someone shows up consistently, completes probation, and stays beyond 12 months? Dependability. And that is rarely what gets tested.
Dependability covers conscientiousness, follow-through, and consistent attendance. It is measurable through validated behavioural assessments, and it predicts retention better than interview performance alone. Yet it is rarely built into a standard screening process.
Screen for dependability alongside relevant skills, and you shift from guessing to predicting.
What an RPO Provider Actually Does
Recruitment process outsourcing means handing part or all of your hiring process to a partner who owns it end to end, not just sourcing candidates. An RPO provider builds the screening, communication, and onboarding steps most in-house teams do not have time to design properly.
For contact centres, that usually means building a process around who is likely to stay, not just who can start Monday.
What Happens When You Screen Differently
One of our contact centre clients in Victoria had secured a major new client and needed to rapidly build two teams: a customer service team and a new technical support function. Their existing team was stretched thin.
Their previous recruitment providers had struggled to keep up. Candidates were dropping out at the interview stage or within the first few days of employment, wasting time for their leadership team and leaving service levels at risk.
TORC, an outsourced recruitment Australia partner for contact centres, built the process differently. We introduced a screening approach centred on responsiveness and dependability checks, designed to identify candidates most likely to ghost, drop out early, or churn within weeks. We simplified onboarding and put structured, consistent communication in place so every new hire felt engaged and looked after from the moment they accepted an offer.
The result: interview drop-outs decreased significantly. Contractor longevity increased. The client built and maintained a stable team of customer support and technical support professionals, and redirected their leadership focus back to the business rather than firefighting recruitment.
The difference was not a bigger recruitment budget. It was a better process.
Why Reactive Hiring Keeps the Revolving Door Spinning
When a seat is empty, the instinct is to fill it fast. Post the role, screen the inbounds, pick the best available option. Repeat.
The problem is that reactive hiring puts you in a permanent position of scarcity. You lower standards because you have to. You make faster decisions than the situation warrants. And you end up with candidates who were simply available, not necessarily right.
The ACXPA report notes that 24% of Australian contact centres now use recruitment agencies to fill vacancies, a figure that has grown for three consecutive years. Much of that spend is reactive. The contact centres that break the revolving door cycle tend to be the ones that start building candidate relationships before the vacancy exists, so they are choosing from genuine interest rather than desperation when the role opens.
5 Things You Can Do Right Now
- Measure early attrition properly. Track retention at 30, 60, and 90 days separately. If nearly one in four of your people are gone before six months, the problem is in your hiring process, not your culture.
- Audit your job descriptions for accuracy. Talk to your team leaders about what the role actually looks like in the first 30 days. If the job description does not reflect that reality, candidates walk in misinformed and leave disappointed.
- Add dependability screening to your process. Integrate a validated behavioural assessment that measures conscientiousness and attendance-related traits alongside your existing skills screening. It does not replace it. It strengthens it.
- Build a preboarding communication sequence. Between offer acceptance and Day 1, your new hire is at their highest risk of disengaging. A structured sequence including a welcome message, team introduction, first-day logistics, and a personal check-in call costs almost nothing and meaningfully reduces early drop-off.
- Start building your pipeline before the seat is empty. Identify the roles you fill most often. Maintain a warm candidate list. Run expressions of interest. When the vacancy hits, you are calling someone who already knows you, not posting to the void.
The Revolving Door Is Optional
Contact centre attrition at 27% nationally, and above 43% in larger operations, is not an industry inevitability. It is the outcome of processes built for speed, not quality.
Screen more deliberately. Engage candidates earlier. Hire for dependability. Get the front of the funnel right, and the back of the funnel takes care of itself.
The contact centres getting this right are not spending more on recruitment. They are spending smarter, often with the help of a recruitment process outsourcing Australia partner who has already solved this problem elsewhere.
TORC
The Outsourced Recruitment Company (TORC) a RPO Provider that delivers services across Australia, giving growing businesses a smarter way to hire.
We work as an RPO provider and recruitment process outsourcing Australia partner, combining Agile RPO, Lean contractor recruitment, and Account Managed Recruitment into models built for SMEs and national enterprises alike.
Need RPO Sydney support for a single hiring surge, or ongoing recruitment support for a small business? TORC is the outsourced recruitment Australia turns to for a hiring experience people actually enjoy. Get in touch: [email protected]
