A Retail Assistant provides your customers with on-the-floor support and assistance. Their job can entail a variety of tasks, including processing sales transactions, keeping the store clean and tidy, and providing customer service and support. As such, Retail Assistants are in charge of the general day-to-day management of your store.
Typical Retail Assistant skills and characteristics to look for during the job interview include:
- Excellent interpersonal skills and a customer-centric mindset
- Ability to stay calm under pressure and polite even when facing difficult, unreasonable customers
- Sales-driven approach to persuade customers to purchase more (expensive) products
- Neat and organised way of working and the ability to apply this same mindset to the interior of the store to ensure it’s presentable
Interviewing a Retail Assistant
Hiring the right Retail Assistant can have a massive impact on how your store is run and how it’s perceived by customers. As a direct point of contact for your customer base, you want to ensure you make the right hire. Luckily for you, we’re here to help.
Below, you can find a list of Retail Assistant interview questions and answers to ask your potential candidate. These questions are designed to ask early on during the interview process, helping you vet through candidates more easily and more effectively. You will quickly find out whether a candidate has what it takes to become a valuable asset to your team.
How to open the job interview
Too often, interviewers resort to scare tactics and grilling candidates to test their knowledge and skills. But this approach generally doesn’t produce the desired results.
Candidates produce much better, more genuine, and more accurate answers if they feel comfortable and at ease. If they feel stressed or anxious, they might fail to give you their best answer. Not because they don’t know, but because they’re overcome by nervousness. As a result, you might think a candidate isn’t a good fit for the job, while in reality they are. You just scared them off.
Instead, open the Retail Assistant job interview with one or two easy questions that they will definitely know the answer to. This helps their confidence, which means they will feel more comfortable as the interview progresses