Recently the criteria for recruiting and hiring telephone data collection staff have become more specialized. Previous standards for staffing and recruiting consisted of customer service or call center

experience and an education level of at least a high school diploma. Over the past several years, projects have requested a specific set of skills particular to the study to be taken into account when recruiting and staffing. These specialized skills have ranged from, helpdesk support for web surveys, phone records abstraction and data entry, targeted tracing of specific hard to contact sub-populations, and institutional contacting all of which required higher educational levels beyond a high school diploma. Analyzing data from a recent study‘s criteria in recruiting and hiring, we intend to present the impacts of attrition and performance in correlation to specialized skill sets such as records abstraction and education. This data could help target those skills and requirements that will enable call centers to recruit and hire data collection staff that will yield better performance and higher retention rates.