Types of Interview Questions To Evaluate Soft Skills

Finding the best candidate and the perfect fit for any requirement in a company can be hard. When it comes to hiring, you certainly look for specific skills that the candidates should have to qualify. While most recruiters look after the technical skills, these aren’t the only ones that must be the deciding factor. You can easily determine the technical skills of a candidate using various technical screening platforms (Testlify is still the #1 best technical skills screening platform)

But more goes into hiring the best candidate for a company. And it’s the soft skills that they possess.

Further down the article, we will be discussing these soft skills, their importance, assessment methods, and various interview questions as well.

What Are Soft Skills?

There are two types of skills – hard skills and soft skills. While hard skills mostly include technical knowledge, soft skills are more inclined towards values and ethics. These include the dexterities that we use to interact with people and are mostly determined by factors like active listening, clear writing, working in a team, having a positive attitude, etc.

Why are these soft skills needed? Having excellent soft skills will determine how well a person can manage people and work with them in an organization. This makes it crystal clear that while hard – or technical – skills are mandatory for a candidate, you can’t ignore their soft skills in them. According to research conducted by Havard University and Stanford Research Center, 85% of organizational success comes through soft skills!

Why Are Soft Skills Important For An Individual?

Soft skills determine how an individual, or an employee, can manage himself and others in the workplace. And that’s not all. If an individual has strong, soft skills, he is more likely to create a better work environment since he knows how to deal with people easily and is a good leader too.

Below are some essential factors that are determined by the soft skills of the employees:

1. Enhanced Communication and Collaboration

Communication is one of those pillars that hold an organization together and the marketplace too. If there are certain communication barriers in an organization, the organization’s chances of making it big is low. This makes sure that there is better collaboration between the concerned authorities in the organization. This reduces the risks that arise due to poor communication, and the efficiency of the workers will be enhanced as well.

2. Better Innovation In The Organization

The whole world is currently in the innovative phase, and this means that organizations need the same as well. And the innovation in an organization depends upon the employees mostly. When you have creative employees, you have a powerhouse of different ideas and innovations. Having technically strong staff can be good, but having technical staff with strong soft skills is the best you can get! This will ensure a better innovative environment in the organization.

3. Swift Solutions to All The Problems

When you have a business, you pretty well know that challenges will be your biggest competitors. You will face new challenges now and then, and you’ll need quick solutions to those. The faster you solve the problems, the lesser resources and opportunities you will lose.

When you have creative employees with solid soft skills, you can be assured that you will have the solutions. It is because these are the employees that will come up with creative ideas and solutions faster than others.

How Can You Evaluate The Soft Skills Of The Candidates?

Assessing the soft skills of an individual while hiring can be an uphill task, and without the right tools, you are never going to get an idea about the skills that an individual possesses. But this, by no means, indicates that you can’t test the creative ability of an employee or a candidate. But before assessing an interviewee’s soft skills, it is a good idea to test the same of your own and your organization’s star performers too.

Now, below are the successful methods that you can use to test the strength of the soft skills that a candidate has:

1. Use Pre-Employment Tests

In the pre-employment methods, you need to prepare an assessment that can better reveal the soft skills of your candidate, i.e., his traits, management ability, creativity, cognitive skills, team spirit, etc. Technical Screening platforms and Assessment tools come in handy with test libraries that help you assess employees before shortlisting. These pre-employment tests are mostly questionnaires, video presentations, aptitude tests with soft skills included, and a lot more.

2. Ask About The Soft Skills Required During The Interview

One of the most effective ways to assess a candidate’s soft skills is to ask about the same during the interview. You can simply put a question about the soft skills that are required for the particular job role. If the candidate understands the job well and can determine the skills required, he might be the one you are looking for!

3. Ask Them To Rate Their Soft Skills

You can simply ask the candidate to name some of their soft skills and then ask them to rate from strongest to weakest. When a candidate tries to impress you by answering what you would like to hear, you can understand that. If the candidates rate the soft skills that you need among their weakest, they are not the perfect fits.

4. Use The References

Most employers try to go through the references of a candidate before hiring them. You can use these references to get an idea about the soft skills of the candidates. While interacting with the references, you can ask some questions regarding their skills, and if you get your desired answers, you have the right candidate.

What Are The Types Of Interview Questions To Assess The Soft Skills?

According to 24seventalent.com, assessing the soft skills of a candidate during an interview can be hard. Still, certain interview questions can greatly help you in determining if the candidate has the required creative skills or not. Below given are the questions that can be put forward as the soft skills assessment task –

Communication Assessment

How do you communicate with your manager when you want to inform him about a complex challenge you face?
How do you make your manager understand that you failed a task assigned to you?
How do you contradict the idea that is put forward by your manager while in a conference?
Describe a time when you had to work with multiple teams.

Time Management Assessment

How do you organize your day from the start to the end?
What methods do you use to keep your work-life balance in check?
Tell me about your solutions to the pressure that you feel when you have a long to-do list.
How routined is your day when you are at work?

Initiative Assessment

Do you ever take the initiative in starting a project?
Explain to me a situation when you felt that the given idea on a project was not relevant, and you took the initiative to restart it.
Tell me about an experience when you went above your set role to complete a task.

Self-discipline Assessment

What do you do to ensure you do not miss the deadline?
How do you complete the least appealing task on your to-do list?
How do you tackle various distractions in your workplace while at work?
You were working from home before this. So how did you manage to keep yourself confined to work with all the hustle in your surroundings?

Professionalism Assessment

What is the reason that compelled you to leave your current employer?
If asked so, will you ever share any confidential information with someone from or outside the organization? What would be your approach?
If you have a problematic co-worker at work, how will you deal with him?

Final Thoughts

Most recruiters ignore the soft skills of a candidate while hiring. But these soft skills determine the success and excellence that any hired employee brings into the organization. Technical skills are required in an individual, but his soft skills can’t be overlooked. You can easily assess the soft skills of anyone during the interview.