It is not a secret that most of the successful people attributes their success in career is largely due to soft skills. According to a passage by Dr. Ron Young it was established in 1918 by Mann’s study that around 80% of success is seen due to soft skills and rest 20% is because of the hard skills.
When we are hiring candidates, we evaluate them on technical skills. It is absolutely must to have those required technical skills. However, what is equally important is to know if candidate has a right attitude. How he or she is going to fit into the team. Is the candidate adaptable to various situations?
Why You Must Evaluate Candidate’s Soft Skills
We all know that the cost of bad hire is huge. You may hire someone technically superior, only to know later that he or she is not a good team player. It could disturb the team’s momentum and could create more problems for you.
Also, it is often, that while interviewing different candidates, you get couple or more equally skilled candidates who know their skills really well. It is always soft skills that would help you differentiate a good candidate from the great one.
But, how do you assess candidates for their soft skills; skills such as communications, collaboration, adaptability. We have compiled a list of soft skills job interview questions which you could ask candidates to evaluate their soft skills.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) Interview Questions
Emotional Intelligence – EQ is how one handles his or her emotions along with emotions of others around. Here are few EQ interview questions that you could ask candidates.
- You failed at something that you worked hard for. How did you handle the failure ?
- How did you feel when your boss give you negative feedback ?
- What was the most rewarding experience in your career and why ?
- Tell us about the time when your project needed help.
- You think you are not happy with the job. How do you address that ?
Emotionally intelligent people are good at rationalizing situations. They can see the situation clearly and hence are able to asses situations in better way.
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<a href="https://cvviz.com/blog/top-soft-skills-job-interview-questions-to-ask/" target="_blank"><img src="https://cvviz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/soft_skills_job_interview_questions-1-1.png" alt="Soft-Skills Job Interview question guide" title="Soft-Skills Job Interview question guide"></a><br/><a href="https://cvviz.com/blog/top-soft-skills-job-interview-questions-to-ask/" title="Soft-Skills Job Interview question guide">Soft-Skills Job Interview question guide</a>Motivational Interview Questions
Motivational interview questions will help you to find what drives or what motivates the candidates. With such question you would be able to find if they would like the existing team or company culture. Here are some important motivational interview questions –
- Tell us about the time when you had to acquire completely new skills to complete the work
- What is your biggest dream ?
- Tell us about your proudest moment at work
- Tell us about the best boss you ever had
- What inspires you the most ?
Answers to these questions should tell you if the candidate is motivated enough. If he or she would find inspiration at work? Will they be able to motivate others in the team.
Insightful Interview Questions
In order to get real insight into why candidate is interested in the job position you may ask insightful interview questions. These kind of questions could be obvious or regular, but they always reveal leads you to important information. Here are few regular but insightful questions.
- Why do you want to change your current job ?
- Why do you want to join this company ?
- What is your learning process ?
- What do you do when you are not working ?
Related – Top Candidate Sourcing Strategies To Hire Best Candidates
Situational Interview Questions
Situational Interview questions will help you know how candidate handled difficult or tricky situations in the past. You can see how quickly they think about different situations, what kind of information they use to make different decisions.
Here is a quick list of few situational interview questions. You can always put a spin on these question or tweak them a bit to make so that they don’t sound boring or cliche
- How do you handle the situation when you realize you are not going to meet the deadline ?
- You realized one of your employees is underperforming. What would you do ?
- You are giving the most important presentation of your life and you see a spelling mistake on the screen.
Behavioral Interview Questions
Behavioral interview questions will help you find how candidate responded to demanding situations. Situations where candidate is put into test both emotionally and logically. A situation where he needs to work his way out with keeping things under control.
Below are few such behavioral interview questions
- Tell us about the time when you were asked to collaborate with a colleague you did not have good terms with.
- What was the most challenging & stressful situation you have been into and how you handled it ?
- Tell us about a situation when your team & senior management were having exactly opposite views about something important.
- You have one of the most important client meetings coming up. How do you prepare for it.
There are no right or wrong answers to soft skills job interview questions. But they help you great deal to know more important things about candidates.
