When it comes to hard skills, it is very easy to put a candidate to the test or ask for some kind of demonstration that confirms their knowledge, be it a certificate or practice.
However, when we talk about soft skills, things get difficult. In almost all cases, the candidate is given the benefit of the doubt more than anything else, and you don’t know until later if they are empathetic, creative, or eloquent as they claim.
No one who has ever worked as a recruiter is oblivious to how often people sell themselves with a couple of extra embellishments on their résumés. And this is understandable, we all want to make a good impression to get that job.
But we cannot sell ourselves as if we have great communication skills and a great sense of responsibility and then perform at work doing the opposite.
Of course, we should always continuously train employees on soft skills, as we do in our monthly workshops.
However, it’s important that from the get-go we have skilled and capable professionals who can perform well in their duties, even if there’s some room for improvement.
But there are always people who are too far from having the skills necessary for a position, despite claiming that they do. To avoid facing the difficult situation of having to fire someone for doing some kind of deceptive self-promotion, the appropriate solution would be not to hire them in the first place.
But how? How can we know when we are faced with this?
How To Evaluate a Candidate’s Soft Skills
Soft skills are associated with the personality and nature of a person. Most of them are abstract concepts that we cannot wrap up in a few words, but we certainly know what they are about, such as leadership, proactivity, and creativity.
A study conducted by CareerBuilder.com found that of 2,138 HR professionals surveyed, 77% believe that soft skills in a candidate are as important as hard skills when it comes to job performance. Therefore, it is clear that their evaluation is a crucial part of the recruitment process.
Some ways to evaluate a candidate to test their soft skills are as follows:
Establish Evaluation Criteria
Defining clearly what skills you are looking to evaluate in a candidate helps a lot to focus your mind on these at the time of the interview, either to find them or to deny them.
Whatever the case, it is important to have a structured idea of the values and behavioral traits that the company needs, to know what it is seeking to achieve with this recruitment process.
Have Your Employees Refer Candidates
Having referrals to hire staff is something that many companies, including Freelance Latin America, do. In this way, the team that is being formed has a better chance of developing in a healthy and pleasant environment. In addition, in this way, you can ask your employees that, when referring someone, they also make a list indicating the soft skills for which this person should be hired.
Challenge Their Soft Skills
The professional responsible for evaluating the candidate must prepare a series of questions that pose a challenge to the candidate. Preferably avoid simple, generic answer questions, such as “Are you a team player?” or “Are you solution-oriented?” and lean more towards asking slightly more personal questions whose answer reveals more characteristics about the person interviewed.
For example, create scenarios that could be presented in a work situation in which those skills were put to the test and analyze the answer, the time it takes to formulate it, and the body language of the interviewee as you deliver your message.
Create The Right Environment
The more relaxed and confident a person feels, the more likely they are to be honest. Besides, we all know that when we feel confident, job interviews go more smoothly and, in the best-case scenario, successfully.
Creating an intimidating environment will only make the candidate feel compelled to meet expectations that are too high and, as a result, give an unrealistic impression of themself that they will later fail to maintain.
Conducting an effective interview is key to creating a pleasant atmosphere for the candidate to be more expressive and spontaneous. The initial idea is to generate empathy, closeness, and warmth, as you would in a conversation in person.
This way, you will have a greater opportunity to see through their words and create a superficial notion of the positive and negative characteristics of the interview candidate.
At the end of it all, the main objective should be that the soft skills of the candidates combine not only with those that are necessary for the job for which they are applying, but also with the core values, work culture, and company’s policies.
A pleasant atmosphere and effective communication from both the interviewer and the candidate should be enough for this to proceed properly, however, it never hurts to apply some of the tips that we mentioned.
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See more articles by Andrea Corona.
