Making a hiring mistake (or joining the wrong company culture) can be devastatingly expensive whether you are the employer or employee. It is commonly said that we hire people for their technical skills, but we fire them for their soft skills.
What are soft skills? They are usually the intangible personal assets that set apart the good from the best employees in most businesses today. Briefly they are described as interpersonal skills, oral communications ability, teamwork capability, and problem-solving skills.
These skills are important because organizations are much less hierarchical than they used to be. Organization structures are flatter and more fluid. Project teams are common, group think counts more, leaders accept input more readily, and younger people have been raised in an environment that sought their opinions on everything. Soft skills are the lubrication within the organization that keeps the team functioning smoothly.
Most interviewers have no problem determining the technical skills of an applicant. Perhaps they use an assessment tool to test knowledge or they may pose a serious of technical questions to determine the competence of the interviewee in a specific discipline. Generally this approach works well in differentiating one candidate from another along technical competence lines.
But assessing soft skills is not so simple. First, the interviewer needs to realize that the impression the candidate gives in the interview probably represents the best you will get with that individual. The person is absolutely putting his or her best foot forward. If that is not the case, the applicant is pretty naïve. So you cannot rely on some overall impression gained while assessing technical skills to provide a good picture of soft skills, too.
Questioning for soft skills means exploring the candidate’s capabilities along different lines. And it is important to establish a comfort level with the applicant before delving into soft skills questions. Nor should it be a surprise to the applicant. It calls for a smooth segue into a new part of the interview. Perhaps you can conclude the technical skills discussion with a comment reflecting on his or her competence and express interest in learning more about how the applicant worked within previous business situations.
This opens the door to soft skills questions that by their nature are a little more probing. In fact as you ask each question, the response should give rise to another question in your mind that will allow you to drill down a bit further. (Note that these comments are written from the viewpoint of the interviewer, but if you are an interviewee you should prepare your answers to these kinds of questions.)
Here are some questions to consider. These are just a few from a long list prepared by Patricia Frame on Strategies from Human Resources available on the Internet.
To assess interpersonal skills ask: “Describe how you developed relationships with others when you were new on your current/most recent job?” or “Give me an example of how you handled a very tense situation at work.”
For an understanding of the person’s oral communication capability ask: “What types of experience have you had dealing with irate customers or clients?” or “Tell me about a time when you ‘put your foot in your mouth’ and what happened.” or “What has been your experience dealing with the poor performance of subordinates.”
For a picture of the applicant’s teamwork ability ask: “Tell me when you think it is important for a manager to use a participative style and involve work unit members in making decisions.” or “Give me an example of a situation in which you managed or led a team and were able to create a high morale, high productivity work group.” or “Tell me about a time you had difficulty getting others to work together on a critical problem and how you handled it.” or “Describe a really difficult person you worked with and how you handled working with that person.”
To assess problem-solving experience say: “Describe a time when you were able to reverse a very negative situation at work.” or “Give me an example of a problem you have faced and how you solved it.” or “Describe a situation in which you had to solve a problem without having all the information you needed—what did you do and what happened?”
In addition to using directed questioning to assess soft skills, behavioral skills can be quite accurately determined using commonly available assessment tools such as the DISC Behavior profile. This assessment can tell you the individual’s natural (unaffected) behaviors and also the behaviors the individual believes the job requires. If the two profiles differ significantly, the person may be easily stressed at work and revert to the natural behavior, which may be unacceptable in the job.
Do you reject an applicant with strong technical skills but weak soft skills? Perhaps you should the culture within your work environment depends upon satisfactory answers to questions like the ones above. Sometimes it’s easier to bring weaker technical skills up to acceptable standards than to improve soft skills. While there is no hard answer to this question, simply add these two facts together: it can easily cost 3-5 times a person’s annual salary to replace the person, and technical skills training is more readily available and results are more measureable. More often the choice should be the person who can “fit in” rather than the “loner” who is super-technically qualified. In making the choice realize that you can improve technical skills through additional training a lot less expensively than the costs of replacing a hiring mistake.
