Imagine a plate of sliced, peeled apples in your kitchen. As you move toward the plate, you imagine how sweet and crisp the apple will taste. You pop one in your mouth anticipating the flavor, and — surprise! Some joker has replaced the apple with a potato. Your mind reels, your taste buds revolt. The experience is decidedly unpleasant. The problem isn’t the flavor of the potato; the problem is that your expectations were not met.

Now imagine walking into a jewelry store to look for a special gift. No sound greets you, and all the employees keep their eyes averted. In frustration, you ask the closest salesperson for help, "No, we don’t handle that anymore," says the salesperson and resumes ignoring you. While not quite as shocking as a mouthful of raw potato, an indifferent customer-service experience is unpleasant. Service like this occurs when a company hires customer- service representatives who do not like, care about or enjoy engaging with people. A potato was hired to do an apple’s job.

One of the biggest challenges in providing great customer service is to select the right people for each position. By making a customer-friendly attitude the priority in hiring, we can use training to fill in gaps in knowledge and skill. Training can teach a process or create skills. However, it cannot transform a person who dislikes people into someone who enjoys providing assistance. Training can solve a lot of problems, but it can’t create friendliness, empathy, helpfulness or "nice."

The best customer-service representatives actually enjoy helping customers. Oddly, candidates apply for and accept positions they will not enjoy. Customer-service positions are a common target for chronic job-hoppers. To avoid selecting a candidate who will hate the work and destroy relationships with customers, businesses must have a solid strategy for hiring "nice" employees (apples).

The willingness to serve others comes from one place and one place only: inside each of us. Before we interview candidates, we must consider what attitudes and attributes are critical for success. When hiring a customer-service representative, the necessary attitudes should be defined by the position. A hospital selecting a nurse’s aide might look for cheerfulness, compassion or empathy. A hotel selecting front-desk staff might look for the ability to offer hospitality and a welcoming manner. An executive hiring an assistant might recruit for great manners and the backbone to appropriately control access to the executive.

Zappos, an Internet shoe retailer, has an interesting method of confirming it has hired the right people. About four weeks into training, employees are offered $1,000 severance. While few accept, it allows Zappos to weed out those who have signed on for the wrong reasons. The policy may sound pricey, but the payoff is in the knowledge that its staff is willing to provide customer service to shoe shoppers around the globe.

A less-expensive strategy is to develop a plan to select employees with the right combination of knowledge, skill and attitude. While knowledge and skill cannot be minimized, attitude is essential when hiring for customer service.

How to hire for apples:

1. Before the interview, make a list of the attitudes, knowledge and skills critical for success. Try to duplicate the attitudes demonstrated by the best employees.

2. Create questions to determine how the candidate has responded to previous customer-service situations. Past behavior is the best indication of how a person will behave in the future. Think about issues that arise in the position and create questions to determine how the candidate would solve the problem. For example: "Tell me about a time when you had to work around policy to solve a problem for a customer." Or, "Tell me about a time when you did something extra for a customer."

3. To double-check for attitude, have the candidate meet and interact with staffers. Set up formal and informal settings for the team to interact with the candidate. The team’s impressions may not be the deciding factor, but an unfavorable impression may tip the balance.

The selection process is time-consuming. But for businesses committed to delivering outstanding customer service, the time spent interviewing and meeting candidates is an investment that will pay off in the long run.