If you’re serious about ensuring that your company functions optimally, it’s important to hire people who will connect with your customers. Doing so can help optimize your client satisfaction rates while also improving your company’s bottom line. Below you will find four strategies you can implement to ensure that you can hire the perfect job candidates:

Ensure That Your Employees Are Educated

One step you should take to ensure that your employees can connect with your customers in a dynamic way is ensuring that they have a good education. Learning about the employee’s educational background before making a hiring decision is important for many reasons. One reason is that individuals with a bachelor of business or even a master’s degree will oftentimes have the advanced skills necessary to complete work-related tasks quickly and correctly. Also, note that customers will typically have more confidence in an employee with a degree.

Ask Unusual Questions During The Interview

In some cases, business owners may use the interview process as the time to learn about a job candidate’s professional capabilities. As such, they ask conventional questions like “What skill set do you possess that makes you the best candidate for the job?” While this type of question is important, it is also a good idea to ask unusual questions that the job candidate wasn’t expecting. Doing so will help you gauge the individual’s ability to think quickly and respond to an unexpected scenario. Individuals who answer these types of questions well will likely be able to connect with clients and handle customer complaints effectively. As noted in The Balance, some of the questions you might ask include:

• If you could be any character in fiction, whom would you be?
• In the news story of your life, what would the headline say?
• If you had to be shipwrecked on a deserted island, but all your human needs such as food and water were taken care of, what two items would you want to have with you?

Look For People with Empathy

It’s important to look for candidates who display kindness and empathy. Individuals who are inherently kind and can interact with consumers on an emotional level will typically go out of their way to ensure that your clients are satisfied. When interacting with these types of employees, customers will typically be able to tell that they genuinely want to help. Even in the event that the employee cannot solve the problem, the customer may still interpret the experience positively due to the sense that the staff member truly cared.

Conduct the Interview with Another Staff Member

In some cases, business owners think they have found the perfect job candidate. Yet it’s typically a good idea to obtain a second opinion before you make a hiring decision. While you might think that a prospect possesses the traits necessary to connect with customers in a dynamic way, discussing the candidate with another staff member who helps you conduct the interview can provide you with a broader frame of reference. We are all at least somewhat subjective and biased in making evaluations about others, so don’t overlook the value of obtaining a second opinion.

If you’re serious about hiring employees who can connect with your clients in a positive, productive way, know that there are several techniques you can use to make it happen. Refer to the information found in this quick reference guide to ensure that you hire the ideal candidates!