What is your way of building rapport with a person you just met?

Recruitment officers would, more often than not, ask a question about rapport building. They want to find out if a candidate has the necessary skills to converse with people and feel comfortable in their presence. Whether it is a behavioral interview, or just the traditional type of interview, you will most likely come across a question that asks how well you build rapport with people you know as well as with people you have just recently met.

Giving a good answer to this question will be to your advantage, thus, preparing for it can definitely help you. In this section, you will learn about why companies consider building rapport a job competency. Moreover, you will also be guided on how to properly answer the question given in such a way that you will be able to gain the admiration of your interviewer.

Importance of Rapport Building

Conversation skill is important because it will help you build better relationships not only with clients and customers, but also with the people you work with. These people may be your boss, your colleague, your teammate, or even the accounting staff that you frequently talk to on matters concerning your job. Because you will always interact with other people, your interviewer would want to know how well you could build rapport.

Finding the Right Answer to the Question

Rapport building is a job competency therefore if you want to increase your chances of getting hired, you must be able to prove that you possess this competency. So, when answering the question, make sure to clearly explain it to your interviewer. You should make use of specific details about a certain situation; explain the steps that you had undertaken in order to develop rapport with someone. Also include in your answer the outcome of the situation (ie you were able to form friendships with a client, which helped you earn more sales). Your interviewer will look into your way of building rapport so be sure that you are able to describe clearly.

Walking the Talk

Although the interviewer can pretty much assess your rapport building skill right from the beginning of your interview, he or she will also want to hear what you have to say. The ability to build rapport can first be determined through a person's facial expressions, confidence, and the tone of voice. Later on, the ability to carry a conversation will also determine how well you can build rapport with another person. All these things are observable and your interviewer will know if you indeed possess the ability to build rapport with ease.

Now, moving on to your answer to the question, you will also need to make sure that you are able to "walk your talk." It would be hard for your interviewer to believe that you can easily converse with a complete stranger if you appear shy and timid during the interview. Although it is normal to feel nervous, you should see to it that you appear confident and easy to talk to during the entire course of the interview.

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Priya Yadav

  • Aug 16th, 2012
 

what kind of things are asked in interviews..? is this neccessary for the people to be interactive?

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