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The Right Questions Lead to the Right Receptionist by Andy Gross
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The Right Questions Lead to the Right Receptionist |
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Home Improvement
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Having a good and dependable receptionist is critical for several reasons. A receptionist welcomes important clients and visitors to a company. Many receptionists also act as a secretary, booking appointments and taking messages. For these tasks, a person must have good organizational skills. The ability to multitask and excellent people skills are also a must for any person considering a job as a receptionist. Because a receptionist is such an important employee at any company, it is no surprise that top management will often make themselves part of the hiring process.
So, how do you go about finding the right receptionist for your business? As with many other jobs, the questions you ask during the interview will give you more insight into the person's abilities than their resume ever will. The following questions should be asked during the interviews you are conducting. They will allow you to narrow your field of receptionist candidates:
1. What is your typing speed when you are using word processing software? How many mistakes do you make on average?
Obviously, typing is a critical skill set for any receptionist to have. You not only want documents typed quickly, but you want them to be free of errors. As for what speed and error level is acceptable, that is completely up to the person doing the hiring. Companies have different standards for this sort of thing. Fortunately, since most people today have grown up using computers, finding people with good typing skills is not as hard as it used to be.
2. What software training do you have regarding office administration and documentation?
Ideally, you want to find a receptionist who is fully proficient in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. There are other mainstream office documentation software programs that are being used frequently. However, those three are still considered to be essential for all receptionists to be trained in. If you have specific programs you want your receptionist to be familiar with, do not forget to ask this during the interview.
3. Do you have any customer service experience? Do you work well with other people?
The way the candidate answers this question can really make or break their chances of getting the job. As mentioned earlier, a reception will deal with clients and guests of your company almost every day. In a way, they are the ambassador of your company. How they treat your clients and guests reflects directly on you and your entire organization. Therefore, you want to find someone who likes to smile and has a pleasant demeanor. The ability to stay calm in stressful situations would also be a benefit to any receptionist. A useful exercise would be to give the candidates a series of stressful situations and see how they would handle them. This can tell you a lot about the type of person you would be hiring.
4. How do you keep everything organized?
Since your receptionist will most likely be handling many scheduling duties, you need to know up front if the candidate has the ability to keep track of names, dates, places and phones numbers in an efficient manner. You don't want to miss a critical meeting because of an error by your receptionist. Have the candidate explain how they catalog all of their information and what programs they use. You should also find out where they will store this information, in the event the receptionist in unavailable and you or another person need to access it.
You also need to consider the issue of call answering when your business is closed. For this task, hiring a 24-hour receptionist service to serve as a virtual receptionist is an excellent idea. Many companies are turning to receptionist services for all of their call answering needs.
Related Articles -
receptionist service, call answering,
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