Across industries today, many recruiters can agree that soft skills are tricky to assess, majorly because they can’t be evaluated with the traditional technical tests. However, due to their importance, overlooking them during recruitment can lead to errors in the process, or worse, a bad hire.
As a talent acquisition manager or recruiter, you want to hire people who can interact properly with others and handle challenges adequately. But, the only way to do this is by designing a soft skill assessment system that is fair, objective, and valid enough to produce accurate results.
In this guide, we explain what soft skills are, why they are so important, and how to assess soft skills in a skill-based hiring process.
What are soft skills and why are they important?
Soft skills refer to the personal attributes and interpersonal abilities that shape how people work, communicate, and collaborate with others. Unlike technical skills, which rely on measurable expertise, soft skills focus on behavior, attitude, and emotional intelligence.
To a large extent, soft skills are rooted in human interaction, which makes them harder to quantify but crucial for long-term success. For example, someone might excel in data analysis but struggle to communicate insights clearly. This can negatively affect team collaboration and, eventually,project outcomes.
Common soft skills include communication, teamwork, adaptability, time management, leadership, empathy, and problem-solving. Each of these skills plays a specific role in how an employee performs in real-world scenarios.
A candidate with strong communication skills can explain ideas clearly, while someone with good adaptability can stay productive amid changing requirements. Put simply, soft skills are important because they:
- Influence how someone approaches challenges.
- Determine how well new employees adapt to different work situations.
- Define how candidates would collaborate with their team and other employees.
- Support leadership potential and long-term growth within the organization.
At the end of the day, these qualities often differentiate high performers from average ones because they directly influence collaboration, resilience, and culture fit.
Why are soft skills hard to assess?
Soft skills are difficult to assess because they aren’t easily measured with traditional tests or credentials. In fact, a LinkedIn Global Talent Trends Report showed that 57% of recruiters struggle with assessing soft skills accurately, but that doesn’t make them any less important.
Here’s a snapshot of reasons why soft skills are hard to assess:
- They are based on behavior and attitude, which can vary depending on context.
- Candidates may present rehearsed responses in interviews, masking true ability.
- They can’t be validated using certificates, test scores, or past job titles.
- Interviewers may interpret communication styles differently.
- They emerge over time, making them tricky to capture in a single interview session.
In all, unlike technical skills that you can measure through quizzes or assignments, soft skills reveal themselves through actual discussions, decision-making, and real-time reactions. This means that as a recruiter, you must rely on context-rich assessments that show how candidates behave in practical scenarios.
How to assess soft skills in skills-based hiring
When assessing soft skills in skills-based hiring, the goal is to create situations that encourage candidates to provide genuine responses. This would give you a clearer sense of their communication style, decision-making, emotional awareness, and collaboration. Here are ways to assess soft skills in skills-based hiring:
1. Use behavioral assessments
Behavioral assessments are designed to measure traits such as adaptability, teamwork, and problem-solving in a structured way. They involve questionnaires or psychometric tests that predict workplace behaviors based on past actions and tendencies.
These assessments consist of questions that lead the candidate to describe how they have behaved in specific situations in the past. Based on their responses, you can identify whether a candidate’s natural behaviors align with the soft skills required for the role, giving a more objective foundation for hiring decisions.
2. Add scenario-based questions to your assessments
Scenario-based questions or Situational Judgement Test (SJT) questions simulate real workplace situations and ask candidates how they would respond. For example, a candidate might be asked how they would handle a conflict between team members or prioritize tasks under a tight deadline. Some more examples of scenario based questions include:
- A client or colleague doesn’t understand your explanation and seems frustrated. How would you handle this?
- You notice a team member is not following instructions correctly. How do you communicate your feedback?
- Your team has to complete a project with tight deadlines, but one member is underperforming. How do you handle the situation?
These questions reveal critical soft skills such as problem-solving, empathy, communication, and decision-making under pressure. In fact, even scientific research shows SJTs have a pooled predictive validity of around 0.32 for job‑relevant interpersonal performance. This indicates that they are highly effective at revealing soft-skills beyond what resumes or interviews might show.
3. Set structured rubrics for scoring soft skills
Structured rubrics provide clear criteria for evaluating soft skills objectively, especially during interviews. Instead of relying solely on subjective impressions, rubrics break down behaviors into measurable indicators, such as clarity of communication, teamwork contributions, or conflict resolution strategies.
Using these rubrics ensures consistency across different candidates and interviewers, reducing bias in the evaluation process. For example, you might score a candidate on a scale from 1 to 5 for empathy based on their response to a scenario. This way, you get to compare candidates fairly and make data-driven hiring decisions.
4. Include peer reviews
Peer reviews involve gathering feedback from colleagues or team members who interact with the candidate during the hiring process. This can include trial projects, collaborative exercises, or even brief peer interviews.
The peers often notice subtle soft skills that formal assessments might miss, such as approachability, collaboration style, or adaptability. According to the Schmidt and Hunter meta analysis, these reviews are a valid predictor of skill and performance. This shows that including multiple perspectives in the evaluation process helps ensure that hiring decisions reflect not just technical competence but also interpersonal effectiveness and potential.
5. Review work samples in the evaluation process
Work samples allow candidates to demonstrate both technical ability and soft skills in context. For example, a candidate could submit a presentation, report, or project they’ve completed, providing insight into their communication, problem-solving, and collaboration abilities.
This approach gives recruiters tangible evidence of how a candidate applies their skills in realistic scenarios. Plus, when you review work samples, you can gain a clearer understanding of a candidate’s creativity, work style, and attention to detail, making it easier to identify those who possess the soft skills needed to succeed in the role.
6. Observe for skill cues throughout the process
Though this is an informal way of assessing soft skills, it still offers undeniable benefits. To do this, ensure to observe candidates during interviews, group activities, or interactions with support staff. Look for cues such as active listening, positive body language, adaptability, and respectful communication.
Backed by SJTs and behavioral questions, these observations can reveal qualities that would affect your hiring decision. In essence, paying attention to these subtle cues throughout the process ensures that you hire individuals who not only perform tasks well but also contribute positively to team dynamics.
Common mistakes recruiters make while assessing soft skills
Assessing soft skills is challenging, and even experienced recruiters can make errors that undermine the process. However, recognizing these mistakes can help you improve accuracy and ensuring you hire candidates with exceptional job fit:
1. Relying on unstructured interviews
With unstructured interviews, the process and questions don’t come with a defined structure so it could vary between candidates. This makes it difficult to fairly compare candidates or evaluate specific competencies because you might not have assessed them in some candidate interviews.
Not only are they ineffective, but they can lead to hiring bias and errors in the process even when you’re transitioning to skills-based recruitment. To avoid this, it is vital to use structured interviews with standardized questions and scoring rubrics, allowing for objective comparisons and more reliable candidate assessment.
2. Over-relying on personality tests
More often than not, recruiters use personality tests as a shortcut for assessing soft skills. While they can provide insights into candidate traits like conscientiousness or agreeableness, they do not reliably predict on-the-job behavior or situational performance.
As such, over-reliance on these tests can make recruiters overlook other critical indicators, such as interpersonal interactions or real-world problem-solving. So, even while applying personality tests, they should be complemented with behavioral evaluations, scenario-based questions, and peer reviews, to provide a balanced picture of a candidate’s potential.
3. Asking only hypothetical questions
Hypothetical or non-specific questions, like those that begin with “What would you do if…?” don’t adequately assess a candidate’s true soft skills. Candidates may give idealized or rehearsed responses that do not reflect their real workplace behavior or might even be difficult to score.
For accurate evaluation, your questions should be grounded in past experiences that encourage the candidate to essentially tell you about their skills. You can use questions that begin with:
- Tell me about a time when…
- How did you handle…
- When was the last time…
These questions can be a mix of behavioral questions and realistic scenarios that mirror actual job challenges. This way, you can observe decision-making, communication style, and problem-solving in context.
6. Failing to reduce bias
Hiring bias in any form can heavily influence soft skill assessment. Sometimes, factors like similarity to the interviewer, gender, ethnicity, or cultural background can distort evaluations, leading to inconsistent or unfair outcomes.
To minimize this risk, use structured scoring rubrics when assessing soft skills and combine multiple assessment techniques. Additionally, it’s important to train your interviewers on how to recognize and mitigate bias to improve the consistency of your hiring process.
7. Overloading assessments
Although using different assessments to measure soft skills can give you a balanced view of the candidate’s job fit, it’s possible to overdo it. Overloading assessments happens when recruiters attempt to evaluate skills using excessive tools or assessment stages. When this happens, candidates can get overwhelmed or even demotivated towards the role.
The solution here is to identify and focus on the soft skills that matter most for the role and use a combination of assessment methods that complement each other. For example, you can combine skill testing with peer interviews and adopt behavioral and scenario-based questions for both techniques. This ensures assessments remain manageable and accurate without getting overwhelming.
Assess soft skills the smarter, fairer way
Assessing soft skills doesn’t have to rely on guesswork, inconsistent interviews, or tools that only tell part of the story. With the right approach, you can evaluate communication, teamwork, adaptability, and problem-solving even while assessing technical skills. All you need are the right questions and a relatable testing platform like Vervoe.
Vervoe’s AI-powered skills assessments allow you to test real behavior through scenario-based questions, immersive tests, structured scoring, and bias-resistant evaluation. So, instead of depending on intuition, you get clear evidence of how candidates think, collaborate, and respond to real challenges based on their responses in our tests.
And the best part is, you get to evaluate these soft skills alongside essential technical skills for the role. Plus, you can easily combine our tests with structured interviews for the best results. Ready to find out how it works? Book a demo and let’s show you!
