Recruiting effective teams in any industry means sourcing top talent with the skills and qualifications appropriate for their roles. However, focusing solely on technical qualifications misses a prime opportunity for recruiters to source team members with the right soft skills and emotional intelligence.
Both recruiters and applicants require emotional intelligence. For the hiring professional, it’s essential to understand the depth of the job seekers’ soft skill set. For the applicant, it helps them demonstrate those soft skills and integrate better into new teams.
By improving their emotional intelligence, recruitment specialists can better assess and prioritize soft skills when recruiting for any area of their business.
Identifying Key Emotional Intelligence Competencies
Emotional intelligence covers many aptitudes that can often translate into soft skills. Soft skills refer to transferable talents that aren’t role-specific or technical in nature. They’re often connected to how people interact with others and manage their workloads, among other aspects of working life.
Someone with strong emotional intelligence may demonstrate the following:
- Good adaptability
- Honesty and openness
- A willingness to accept criticism
- Integrity
- Excellent communication skills
- Resilience
- Critical thinking
Noticing evidence of these traits during interviews can help you quickly identify candidates with the right soft skills to create effective teams.
Using Behavioral Interview Techniques
One of the best ways to gather this evidence is through behavioral interviews. These focus not just on what a candidate did but also on why and how. So, instead of centering the interview on experience and achievements, you’re discovering how your applicant works and what that can bring to your organization.
Consider asking variations on the following questions:
- What led you to make that decision?
- What was the impact of that action?
- What motivated you to make that choice?
- How would you react in this situation?
- What did your team think of your solution in that instance?
Adapting these questions to your organization and industry can help you get a more detailed picture of applicants’ empathy and understanding beyond their technical experience.
Assessing Interpersonal Skills and Empathy
Empathy is a key aspect of emotional intelligence, as it’s how we place ourselves in another’s situation. For customer support staff, for example, empathy is necessary to deal with complaints and challenging calls. Without empathy, customer interactions can become combative and unpleasant for both parties, significantly impacting an organization’s reputation.
However, empathy isn’t just necessary for customer-facing employees. Empathy is also essential for developing effective interpersonal skills that aid in everything from management to integrating into a new team.
Assessing candidates for empathy can be challenging without adjusting questions and techniques to shift away from solely focusing on technical qualities. Role-playing can be a good way to understand how someone may react in a given situation. However, recruitment specialists should note that not all applicants may be comfortable with these techniques, and they shouldn’t be used without the applicant’s prior knowledge.
Training Recruiters to Evaluate Soft Skills
With that in mind, recruitment leaders should train their team members to recognize and evaluate soft skills. Statistics suggest that 54% of job applicants don’t include information about soft skills on their resume or cover letter, so it’s up to savvy hiring professionals to determine their strengths and weaknesses.
Many organizations work with recruitment partners who are experts in emotional intelligence and soft skills and start in-house training initiatives around these topics. Leveraging an industry partner’s experience can be a cost-effective way to hire top talent faster and improve the overall recruitment experience for everyone involved.
Balancing Technical Qualifications with Emotional Intelligence
Of course, interviews and other aspects of recruitment shouldn’t focus solely on soft skills. It’s still vital that you source highly qualified employees for the roles you need to fill. It’s all about balance — finding someone with technical expertise and great interpersonal skills.
Someone could be the best in the world at their job, but if they can’t integrate into your teams, that’s potentially a wasted hire. These can represent massive financial drains on your organization as you must pay to search for new applicants and re-hire an alternative prospect.
Create Better Teams by Hiring for Emotional Intelligence
By training recruiters to recognize emotional intelligence, you can ensure that you’re creating teams that will drive your business forward. You’ll see better team dynamics, improved collaboration, and higher overall organizational performance.
For more information on instilling your recruitment teams with emotional intelligence and the skills to recognize it, connect with MRINetwork, your trusted expert in all things recruitment-related.