Are you a title company, mortgage broker, loan officer, escrow officer, Attorney or other entity that hires notaries? You can’t just hire any old Notary. You need to ask them questions. But, what would you ask them?

Should you ask questions about how they would handle particular situations? Or should you ask more cut and dry technical questions about notary procedure? How about asking them to describe certain documents?

Many title companies I talk to judge a notary based on the first twenty seconds of interaction. They can tell right away by a person’s tone, demeanor, and style of communication how the discussion is going to go and how the work is going to go.

For me, I prefer to judge people based on multiple layers. Interaction, competency, motivation in maintaining their profile, etc. Only looking at their initial phone demeanor says a lot, but that is not enough to size someone up in my opinion.

If you are hiring Notaries, think carefully about what is important to ask them. What you ask a Notary reveals a lot about what the notary knows, how they think and how cooperative they are about answering questions.