Candidate Interviews: Analyzing soft skills to find the right match.
Traditional interviews can be daunting for the interviewer and the candidate. It can be tough to assess a candidate’s skills to gauge if they are a great organizational match in a 60 to 90-minute interview.
Finding the right candidate match means identifying the potential for interconnectivity between the soft and hard skills they possess and those of current team members.
Soft skills are interpersonal abilities, personal habits, or traits one displays in relation to people and work. Soft skills are subjective and are unquantifiable like hard skills. When asking questions during an interview, consider the context of each candidate's response.
Assessing multiple soft skills with fewer questions is possible. Doing so can thereby shorten the interviewing time. Here’s an example:
Sample Interview Question: Describe a problem that you’ve encountered in a previous role and the steps you took to solve it.
Soft skills assessed: This question mainly tests for awareness, initiative, and critical thinking.
Guided analysis:
Awareness - How did the candidate come to the realization of the problem? Noticing the problem on their own means that they were aware and alerted to the irregularities in either a procedure or an outcome.
Initiative - How did the candidate react to the awareness of the problem? Was their first instinct to attempt to resolve the issue? Did they disclose the problem to their supervisor first to either present a resolution or ask for delegation? Think about the procedure your business already has in place. Would the candidate encounter a learning curve to comply with existing procedures?
Critical Thinking - Probe the candidates’ thinking process by reviewing the steps mentioned from start to finish. Was inductive or deductive reasoning used to form a conclusion?
When hiring employees, carve out additional time to analyze soft skills to find the right match.
