Tips for Interviewing Wedding Planners
A wedding planner's job is to make your work as a bride easier. The planner should be competent, well organized, affordable and flexible.
Most brides hiring a wedding planner are looking for someone to help alleviate the stress of planning their special day. If a wedding planner is good at the job, that is just what will happen. However, picking the right wedding planner for you is going to take some work. Don't just pick anyone with the title wedding planner. It is important to interview them and consider if they are a good match for you and if their skill set matches what you want in a wedding planner.
The first thing to do before you even start looking for names of wedding planners to interview is to think through what exactly do you want the wedding planner to help out with. Do you need help with all the details and figuring out caterers and music? Or do you have all the details worked out and you are just looking for someone to run the events during the ceremony and reception to keep things running smoothly so you won't be bothered with questions about how something should go?
Determining the level of involvement you want your wedding planner to have is important in order for them to quote you an accurate price and so that you can be very clear about your expectations. Some brides have high expectations of their wedding planners and expect them to handle all the details, the bookings etc and if that is the case the wedding planner needs to know that. Just like in every field there are some wedding planners that are suited to that type of work and there are some that are not and that are just not willing to go to that level of effort.
Another important thing to consider is how much are you willing to pay. The more invovled you want the wedding planner to be the more their services are going to cost. Make sure you inquire about whether the wedding planner has any connections or works with any facilities or vendors that you could get discounts with. Sometimes the amount you can save through their connections to vendors offsets the cost of the wedding planner and allows you to spend more on the planner than you originally thought you could budget.
Interview several wedding planners before you choose one. It is important to get a feel for several of them in order to determine which one is going to fit your needs best. It is wise to go into the interview already knowing the basics of your wedding. If you don't know how many people you want to invite, whether you want the ceremony in the church and a different location for the reception or whether everything is going to be in the same place, whether you are going to have a full meal or not etc., you will not get a good idea of what the planner can do for you. The more details you can provide about your event and the clearer you can be about what you want their level of involvement to be, the better idea you will have about the wedding planner being a good match. If you are expecting the wedding planner to do a lot of work before the wedding day even gets there be upfront about it. Don't pretend you are a low maintenance bride if you are not.
Also, consider how easy the wedding planner is to talk to and whether the ideas they have are things you like. You want to choose a wedding planner that can share your vision and that you can get along with. If the wedding planner is super bossy and pushy and you're irritated after talking to them for 15 minutes, they are not a good choice. As your wedding day gets closer the stress is going to mount so if you're already thinking you don't really like this person the chances of your feelings changing to more favorable ones as your wedding day approaches are slim to none. The whole reason to hire a wedding planner is to make things easier for yourself but if you choose someone with a personality that you clash with you are not helping yourself out.
Remember that planning your wedding should be fun. There will be moments that are stressful or not so fun when things don't go quite the way you envisioned them but overall it should not be a horrible experience. Make sure that you pick a wedding planner that will do more good than harm; one that shares your vision, is easy to get along with and talk to, and that is willing to yield to you even if they have other ideas of how things should go.
