Strong social skills are invaluable. Are you assessing candidates’ social skills when recruiting? It’s a common area that gets overlooked during the hiring process. Many companies are focused on a candidate’s technical skills, experience, and knowledge.
Here we will outline why assessing social skills is so important and the types of social skills you should assess during the job interview process:
Why Are Social Skills So Important?
Everyone needs to have good social skills, or what others call emotional intelligence. You need to have employees with strong social skills so they get along with coworkers and build relationships with clients. Employees also need them to build a strong company culture.
You can hire a highly intelligent and technically savvy person, but if they lack social skills, you’ll have a difficult time integrating them into your team. Their lack of social capabilities can hurt their ability to work effectively with others, it could negatively affect morale, and it could lessen their technical effectiveness because of social barriers.
Which Social Skills Should You Be Assessing During the Hiring Process?
1. Self-awareness: A good employee understands how their actions and what they do in the workplace affects others. They understand how their role affects other roles within the company. An effective way to test the self-awareness of candidates is to ask situational and behavioural questions that are related to how they interact with coworkers. References can also provide some insights into a candidate’s self-awareness in previous roles.
2. Empathy: Having empathy for others is important. Employees who care for each other will help foster a more inclusive and close-knit company culture. Watch out for candidates who place the blame elsewhere and take a more judgemental stance.
3. Social intelligence: Emotionally intelligent people understand how they can influence others. A lack of social intelligence can negatively affect others. During the interview, look for candidates who miss common social cues and tend to lack social awareness.
4. Emotional balance: The workplace can be stressful. How a candidate reacts to stressful situations can have a big impact on performance and also affect how others act. Ideally, you want to hire employees who can keep control of their emotions at all times. However, this can be difficult to assess until an employee is actually in the moment. Role-playing scenarios are an effective way to see how a candidate reacts to stressful scenarios.
More Hiring Advice From A Toronto Recruitment Company
DON’T Overlook the Importance of Soft Skills
How to Effectively Use Social Media to Recruit Top Talent
4 Ways to Reduce the Odds of Getting Ghosted by Job Candidates
IQ PARTNERS is an Executive Search & Recruitment firm supporting clients across the country. We help companies hire better, hire less & retain more. We have specialist teams of recruiters in Executive Search / Board & C-Suite, Technology, Media, Digital & Marketing, Accounting & Finance, Financial Services & Insurance, Cannabis, Startup, Data Science, Consumer, eCommerce & Retail, Operations & HR, Manufacturing, Supply Chain & Engineering, Legal & Professional Services, Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences, Non-Profit & Sustainability, and Sales. IQ PARTNERS has its head office in Toronto and operates internationally via Aravati Global Search Network. Click here to view current job openings and to register with us.
