Testing Candidates’ Soft Skills
Posted May 12th, 2014
Many employers consider soft skills just as important – if not more important – than a candidate’s hard skills.
Why? Because most people who leave a company don’t do so because they can’t do the job; they leave because they don’t fit into a company’s or department’s culture, and it’s those soft skills that help a candidate fit in.
Soft skills include the ability to communicate well with others, the ability to ask for direction or to work alone. They also include personal habits, friendliness, optimism, the social graces, as well as other personality traits.
Personality and work-style habits also play a huge role in whether a candidate can be a success in your company or department. For example, if a hiring manager likes his or her staff members to be at their desks working at 8 a.m. no matter what, and a candidate has a more of a “it doesn’t matter when I come in so long as I get my work done on time and I do it well” personality, the candidate may not be a good fit for that manager.
Bay Area candidates with the types of technology skills employers need are becoming increasingly harder to find. That’s why we’re finding that many of our clients are hiring for attitude and soft skills rather than for hard or technical skills. They believe they can train someone who’s a good cultural fit in the skills needed, but it’s almost impossible to change someone’s personality.
In other words, clients are starting to hire for attitude not skills.
To help you ascertain a candidate’s soft skills and “fit,” consider asking the following types of interview questions:
- Give me an instance of how you handled a very stressful or tense situation at work.How well do you get along with co-workers who have very different attitudes about work than you do? Tell me about a time that you and these difficult co-workers had a hard time working together and how you handled it.
- Tell me about the best boss you ever had. What made him or her best in your eyes? Why do you feel this way about your boss?
- Under what type of management style do you thrive?
- Tell me about a time you had trouble with a boss and what you did to resolve it.
- When work gets tough, what do you do to cope?
Looking for great employees for your Bay Area company? If you are looking for a staffing agency in Fremont, contact us today.
