Assessing Soft Skills During the Interview
by Nancy S. Ahlrichs, SPHR
Summary:
- Soft skills like relationship building are often overlooked.
- Employers hire for hard skills, but fire over soft skills.
- Behavioral interviews gauge soft skills.
If you have ever been disappointed after hiring someone with all the right technological know-how, product experience, excellent diction or other hard skills, you know the pitfalls of job descriptions and interviews.
The Big Mistake
Since the 1998 McKinsey study, "The War for Talent," found that star performers are 50 to 100 percent more productive than average performers, employers logically want to hire more star performers who not only outperform their average peers, but also fit in and stay longer at the job.
But all too frequently, every element of the recruiting process -- advertising, job descriptions, interview questions, reference checks -- focuses on the hard skills part of the job opening, and disregards the critical importance of soft skills. As a result, employers have inadvertently lowered productivity and increased turnover. We hire for the possession of hard skills and fire for a lack of soft skills.
Holistic Hiring
Today, leading companies focus on integrating the necessary soft skills into all aspects of hiring. Soft skills are often referred to as competencies, or collections of observable behaviors that excellent performers exhibit much more consistently than average performers. These might include building relationships, fostering open communication and motivating others, but each organization should define these further.
Christine Deputy, a regional director of human resources for Starbucks Coffee Company, shares how Starbucks lowered turnover of store managers when it returned to using the best managers' competencies as a key element of the hiring process. In her August 2001 presentation to the IQPC Diversity Recruitment and Retention Conference in San Francisco, Deputy told the audience that the critical success factors for hiring are, "technical skills and knowledge, competency (behavior) profile and cultural fit."
Benefiting from Behavioral Interviews
Using focus groups and interviews with top store managers, Starbucks developed nine competency groups that are used as the basis of interview questions. Specific sets of questions were then developed to elicit evidence of experience using each competency. This is behavioral interviewing. Behavioral interviewing skills are built into Starbucks' management training program.
Like Starbucks, other employers are no longer asking candidates, "What would you do if 'X' happened?" Instead, they focus on uncovering behaviors already used by the candidate in earlier work situations. They ask candidates describe a time when they demonstrated each needed behavior. Typically, candidates are asked a three-part question: To overview a situation, describe what they did and share the outcome. "If they cannot tell a story, they do not have the competency," say Deputy.
To increase the odds of receiving qualified applicants, many employers build the requisite competencies into their job descriptions, advertising, reference checks and training programs. They train hiring managers as well as human resources specialists in behavioral interviewing to reduce the number of technically qualified hires who lack the soft skills needed to do well. Interviewing for soft skills and training for hard skills is the less expensive, more direct way to increase productivity and decrease turnover.
