4 Essential Skills to Consider Before Hiring a Security Officer
Businesses often hire security officers to protect their expensive items. Security officers can also make clients feel safe when shopping.
However, hiring a security officer can be challenging due to the long process involved. For this reason, businesses prefer hiring their security officer from security firms. This article highlights four skills that security firms consider when they hire officers.
1. Communication
Communication refers to the process of passing information from one person to another. Effective communication entails listening attentively to visitors, business owners, or team members and responding thoughtfully.
A security officer needs to possess good verbal or written communication skills. Good verbal communication skills help officers pass information to other team members effectively. These skills can also help officers easily communicate with visitors about security concerns.
Additionally, if the officers need to pass important information to customers, good verbal communication skills will enable people to understand what they are saying.
Written communication skills can help security officers prepare reports if anything happens where they work. These reports can help you prepare a court case in the event that you decide to seek legal help. Written communication skills can also help the officers prepare reminder notes to help them stay organized.
To determine whether a person has good communication skills, watch their body language during the interview. Generally, effective communicators try to make eye contact when passing information. Additionally, you need to watch the interviewee's response style, including passive, assertive, aggressive, and passive-aggressive. A person with good communication skills assertively answers questions.
2. Physical
Fitness
A security officer's job entails various physical challenges. For instance, officers may spend most of their time walking around buildings to look for suspicious activity or suspiciously placed items. Security officers may also need to confront trespassers or remove them from a building. Moreover, an officer may need to restrain a suspect physically before the police arrive. For this reason, security officers should be physically fit.
When interviewing a potential security officer, ask them about their physical fitness routine. You can also assess the officer's physical fitness by giving them challenging physical activities and seeing how they handle them. For instance, you can ask the officer to lift a heavy load or walk up a couple flights of stairs.
3. Honesty
Security is a sensitive issue in a business. Once you hire a security officer, they become part of the business. Therefore, officers may know where you keep vital documents and other expensive machines. If you hire a security officer, you need to ensure that you and your employees can trust the officer.
Therefore, before hiring a security officer, you need to run a background check to ensure they have never been involved in any crimes of dishonesty. You can also ask the officer to bring a recommendation letter from previous clients.
4. Team Player
Security officers sometimes need to work as a team to ensure maximum security. For instance, when taking huge sums of money to a bank, the vehicle carrying the money usually has two or more officers. Also, teamwork can be beneficial when officers watch the activities in a building through various monitors and communicate via two-way radio or cell phones with one another.
When security officers work as a team, things will run smoothly, which helps them avoid costly mistakes.
To know if the officer you intend to hire is a good team player, ask them about the assignments they have handled as a group and their personal contribution. You can also ask the officer if they have ever encountered a situation in which the group refused to implement their idea and what they did. You can also ask the officer how they handle team members who are not putting in enough effort.
If you are planning to hire a security officer, look for a firm that hires officers with the above qualities. To get skilled security officers, contact Security Services Northwest, Inc.
