Interviewing for an assistant to help you in your everyday CRE duties is no easy task. You want to insure that the right person with the right skill set is joining your team. Someone who knows the ins and outs of commercial real esate or at least willing to learn and grow in this hectic industry.
Conducting a great interview will help insure that you hire the right CRE assistant to help keep your commercial real estate worklife in order.
Here are 3 tips that we here at myNOI find helpful when hiring an assistant and all our new CRE team members.
1. Have Candidates take the DISC Test
As we mentioned in our “The DISC Test and Building a Healthy Team” blog, we have all our candidates take the DISCT test; we truly believe that the DISC test provides us with a better understanding of potential employees and essentially helps us build healthy and diverse teams. We use the word “test” lightly, the DISC test is more of an assessment that helps employers grasp a better understanding of each candidate’s behavior and their opinions in the workplace environment.
Try taking the DISC test yourself, one of our favorites is Tony Robbin’s DISC Personality Test.
2. Ask the Right Questions
Asking each candidate the right questions is not only essential to your understanding of each candidate’s experience and their work ethic, but asking the right questions also provides each candidate with an idea of what is expected of them on an everyday basis. Make sure to compile a list of questions that apply to the role at hand; these questions should ask candidates about the methods in which they tackle certain tasks and situations, for instatnce: reasearching, creating reports, confrontation with others, etc.
Here are a list of questions from Ready Prep Interview that we look to as a guide in conducting our own interviews.
3. Ask for Work Samples
A candidate can have attractive DISC results and have all the right answers to your interview questions, but to truly grasp an idea of a potential assistants quality of work and their work ethic, you should ask for a sample of their best work. In addition to asking for an example of their previous work you should ask your candidate to produce a piece of work for you. Specificalling ask the candidate to produce a sample of work, whether it be writting up a blog post or compiling a spreadsheet of data. Asking the candidate to present a sample of work allows you to see their ability to follow instructions, the quality of work they’re capable of producing, and their ability to work under time constraints.
For more readings, visit: Tony Robbins and Ready Prep Interview.