I was recently chatting with a few friends (Abhishek and Pallav, owners of various IT companies) and the topic of short-listing candidates applying for jobs in our companies came up. We were pretty unanimous that while we do take a cursory glance at the academic scores and colleges from where they have studied, we mostly search for off-beat work that they have done while in college.
Customer service is a very important tool for business growth. If you are serving your customers well, you can hope to grow much more because they will continue to give their business to you as well as refer you to other people. However I have noticed in my interaction with our customers as well as other service providers that empathy towards the customer is also a very vital asset we must have.
Recently my wife was diagnosed with a pretty serious ailment requiring a long and expensive treatment. We got wind of this during one of the master health check ups. Another close relative, whom we literally forced to undergo a health check up discovered major thyroid deficiency. This reminded me of the age-old maxim – “A stitch in time saves nine.”
More on Are you checking your business and personal health regularly?
As an employer who regularly interviews people, I keep getting requests like these from students and job-seekers: “I will only get 10-15 minutes in the interview. How can I communicate my skills effectively within such a short time?”
I was the keynote speaker at a national seminar on “HR practices in service oriented companies“, organised by Srusti Academy of Management at Bhubaneshwar. Here are the excerpts from my presentation. Students will find this particularly useful, though it should be quite valuable to budding entrepreneurs also.
