Month: May 2019

We’ve all heard of them. And if you’re lucky, you’ve been a part of one: the standout team with effortless flow in the workplace. This team appears to have an extrasensory quality to their group dynamic that makes no task impossible.

Whether it’s a team of 4 or 400, group dynamics matters. Unless you’re a lone entrepreneur, you have a team at play in your business. And when your employees work well together, they are more likely to work harder and stick around.

Achieving great group dynamics depends on each member investing in the success of the team and contributing in a relevant and useful way. A 2019 study from New York University found people who are naturally attuned to others’ emotions are better able to judge how well small groups perform together.

Fully understanding group dynamics and hiring with them in mind ensures you build and maintain a happy, productive, power-house team. To build a better group dynamic in your organization, focus on these aspects during the hiring process:

Determine emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the feelings of others. Employees with high emotional intelligence (EI) are worth their weight in gold.

The top EI skills to seek out during the hiring process are:

• emotional awareness
• the ability to harness emotions and apply them to tasks
• the ability to manage emotions, both one’s own or, when necessary, to shift group emotions

Test the emotional intelligence of your applicants by asking situational questions during the interview. How did they handle an unethical situation at work? What happened when they had to deal with a conflict with a supervisor?

When top candidates describe these experiences, they should be able to elaborate and give you the full-picture view. Be sure to dive in with follow-up questions to get a thorough grasp of their perspective. Choose scenarios that candidates are likely to face if you hired them. For different roles, EI requirements will vary.

Because the specific needs of each role impact which emotional intelligence traits should be emphasized, the assessment of those factors is equally important to consider. Employing one-way video interviews instead of phone interviews early in the screening process allows you to pay special attention to your candidates’ reactions and body language. This is especially important when seeking out high emotional intelligence.

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Emotional intelligence is the ability to identify and manage one’s own emotions, as well as the emotions of others.
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Consider social sensitivity

Social skills are critical to a healthy group dynamic. Social sensitivity is the proficiency of an individual to identify, perceive, and understand cues and contexts in social interactions. It’s also about being socially respectful to others. Having high levels of social sensitivity makes someone more likable and successful in all relationships.

Screen for social sensitivity during your hiring process by bringing in top candidates for job auditions. This new hiring trend is a nice option for vetting candidates for highly-collaborative roles. Bring in candidates for a day of work with their potential co-workers. Rather than tackling a big project during that time, have them sit in on a team brainstorming session.

Hone in on what candidates say and how they say it. Are they considerate of others’ ideas? Are they willing to speak up? Do they seem to seek the spotlight?

Ideas aren’t the goal of this audition. Assess how each individual candidate gels with the current team and observe communication and reactions. And don’t forget to let the current employees weigh in during the process.

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Gauge the social sensitivity of candidates by teaming them up with current employees for a job audition.
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Incorporate potential team members in the interview process

When it comes to hiring for group dynamics, the real MVPs of the interview process are the employees who would be teamed up with the new hire. Make your interview process as collaborative as possible. Start by drafting interview questions as a team, as well as determining a list of skills and qualifications required to ensure the new hire would be invaluable to the current team dynamics.

This is also a great opportunity to explore video interviews. They are the perfect way to boost collaboration in the hiring process. If you can’t gather as a group to watch, team members can review recorded live interviews on their own time and take notes or make comments on each candidate.

Establishing a collaborative hiring process that focuses on seeking out emotional intelligence and social sensitivity is sure to create a powerful group dynamic within your organization.

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from Human Resources Blog – Spark Hire http://bit.ly/2wxS0gh
http://bit.ly/2uUuklq

Your customer service employees are your front line. They must help, inspire, connect, and act as a reflection of your company values. But you can only provide top notch customer service with the right individuals in place.

Excellent customer service starts with outstanding hires. Making good customer service hires isn’t just about attracting qualified, competent applicants — it also means establishing a hiring process to assess the necessary traits for customer service success.

We asked experts in various industries to share their customer service hiring knowledge with us. Here’s what to look for when hiring a first-time customer service employee and how to identify those traits during the hiring process:

Patient personalities always prevail

Traits that I look for are patience, communication skills, high emotional intelligence, jovial personality, and creative problem-solving. In our business, customer service is not just about providing solutions to a customer’s problem. The main part of the job involves dealing with our customer’s emotions, making sure their problem is fixed and they are well taken care of. We want to instill excellence when it comes to customer happiness.

In terms of the hiring process, in the first stage, we usually conduct a Q&A to better gauge their personality — because a likable and patient personality plays a huge role when it comes to customer service. We provide mock customer service tests from our existing sample of customer interactions to evoke problem-solving scenarios to gauge their problem-solving skills under pressure, as well.

Jeremy Ong, founder of HUSTLR

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Being likable and patient plays a huge role in #customerservice. Mock customer service tests can reveal these #traits.
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Self-awareness equates to coachability

The most essential trait of a great customer service employee is self-awareness, not empathy. With evident self-awareness, an employee is more coachable. They are not going to get it right all the time. However, if they can listen to feedback, evaluate themselves in hindsight, and separate themselves from their performance in one customer interaction or another, there’s opportunity for growth into excellent customer service delivery.

Ask applicants to describe situations specifically in his or her past. Invite the telling of stories and notice where they place themselves in that story. Are they the hero? The victim? What do they emphasize as the lesson? Self awareness should manifest in their capacity to see their own role, their own contribution in all its good and bad parts. Do they recognize something in which they could improve, or is it a story of injustice or survival?

We pair this with a personality test, preferring those inspired by Jung. Then we invite the applicant to comment on what the personality test reveals, how much of it surprises them or seems off.  When combined with stories from the past, this yields a fruitful interview, whether in video interview or in-person interview format so the facial expressions are clear.

Patrick Pittman, president of E-Business Coach, Inc.

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#Self-awareness is a more important trait than empathy in #customerservice roles because it reveals coachability.
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Creativity is essential for problem-solving

Customer service is our strongest suit. It’s what keeps our customers coming back for more. And that’s because we hire exactly the right people for the job. One Christmas season, we had just over one thousand applications to be a seasonal customer service representative. We hired 11 of them, not based on their experience, but based on their personality — each one was amazing.

We look for two things. First, we look for people who truly love people. Second, we look for creative problem-solvers. In the application process, we ask questions for creative problem solving such as what they would do with a pencil. If they say they can write with it or it’s good for holding paper down on a desk — that’s a no-go. If they say you can use a pencil to poke an attacker in the eye, stir coffee, kill bugs, clean out cracks in a bench, spread peanut butter, play pencil wars, start a fire, spear a fish or use as an axle for a toy car, then we know we have our person.

Dave Munson, founder and CEO of Saddleback Leather Co.

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Look for people who truly love people and who are creative #problem-solvers.
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Passion for the product is essential

We found great success with our first customer service hires who are passionate about our space (blockchain/cryptocurrencies). They are people who really try to understand the space and thus have a deeper understanding about the industry.

To assess their passions, ask candidates about their interests or what they do in their free time. Our greatest customer service hires encompass some elements of the different verticals that our company is in. If they read a lot of related articles in the free time, it shows that they genuinely care about the space.

The best approach we’ve found for hiring is to reach out to the users in our platform. We

have a weekly email digest that we send, and we include a small section on the bottom when we are hiring for a role. The best candidates that we’ve seen have come from our users. So leverage your existing customer base for customer service roles!

Tommy Chan,  co-founder of AltCoin Fantasy

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The best customer service hires are #passionate about the space.
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A can-do attitude is key

First-time customer service employees should possess a can-do attitude and have a positive, enthusiastic disposition. Many customer service roles require interacting with customers, whether it’s over the phone or in person, and a good attitude is a must. Customer service employees must be willing to listen, understand, and see situations from the customer’s perspective. Whenever a customer is upset, it’s easy for them to get emotional and it’s important that reps stay patient with them.

For example, a candidate who formerly worked at a cafe might describe an instance where a customer arrived for a pick-up order that is still not ready. The customer might have been upset during this time, and the candidate may have simply apologized for the error and offered them a complimentary drink or dessert item while they waited. This seemingly simple solution gives us greater insight into how these applicants approach and handle difficult situations with grace.

Deborah Sweeney, CEO of MyCorporation.com

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Customer service hires should always have a #can-do attitude.
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from Human Resources Blog – Spark Hire http://bit.ly/2wxRWx3
http://bit.ly/2uUuklq