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For several years now, candidates' personality traits have been just as much in demand as technical skills.
Adaptability, team spirit and emotional intelligence are words that have entered the HR vocabulary along with experience, training, and technical expertise. And because everyone is different, there are hundreds of these behavioral skills, or soft skills. The challenge is twofold: identify the soft skills your company needs and detect them in candidates during the recruitment process.
Download the ebook “100 interview questions to identify soft skills”
1. How do you assess soft skills?
To guide your candidates’ soft skills assessments, start by asking yourself 3 questions:
Will this candidate be able to grow and succeed in the company?
Will they be able to grow and succeed with their team?
Will they be able to develop and succeed in their position?
The goal is to understand if the candidate is a culture fit. Will they get along with the team, accept management, is their communication style adapted, etc. Being clear on these elements is a first step to know if the candidate will be comfortable in their new team and able to fully express their potential.
2. Which soft skills to look for?
The first step is to be aligned with your coworkers and make sure the recruiting team and hiring managers are looking for the same soft skills in future hires. So, before you begin, understand precisely how your company works and why it works the way it does. Look closer at your company culture, values, the size of your teams, your relationship with customers, service providers, etc. To help you with this task, ask around for feedback and insights from other departments. The second step will then be to create a persona to describe your ideal candidates for each position. Define a precise set of skills and characteristics one needs to fit in and blossom in your organization. Choose 4 to 5 skills maximum to stay focus and avoid looking for someone who does not exist. For example, customers using the EASYRECRUE platform evaluate an average of 2 essential soft skills during the pre-selection phase. Although technical skills can be easily identified by reading a CV, only a face-to-face or recorded interview will shed light on soft skills.
3. How to ask the right questions?
To evaluate your candidates' soft skills, prefer open-ended questions and don't hesitate to ask more original questions that will give them the opportunity to reveal themselves in a new way. Do you need someone who can work effectively with your existing team members to boost productivity and morale? As a facilitator, seek to learn more about their behavior and motivations, their way of working and how they reach targets.
Take time to train your managers on those questions and remind them which questions they should not ask for legal reasons.
How do you identify your candidates’ soft skills in interviews? Asking pertinent and precise questions is a way to get different, original, and more unique answers. We have compiled the 20 most sought-out soft skills in 2020 and we offer 5 questions to identify each of them.
