Recruiting for soft skills has become imperative for organisations when looking to build a collaborative and positive work force. These are qualities in key categories such as communication, team work, adaptability and interpersonal skills that set people aside from everyone else with the same qualifications and experience.

It is important to strategically recruit for soft skills to ensure your team is not only technically efficient but also possesses the interpersonal skills required to have long term success in a role. They can sometimes be difficult to quantify though.

With this in mind, how can you tell at interview stage if a candidate that looks perfect on their CV, will turn out to be so in person?

Whilst many candidates will list soft skills on their CV, it can be hard to measure these during an interview. Asking behavioural and situational questions is a good way to allow candidates to give you real life responses to actual scenarios. From the way they describe how they handled situations you can understand better whether they possess the skills they say they do. These questions can often start with ‘Tell me a about a time when..’ or ‘Describe how you dealt with (a certain situation)..’

This type of open question opens up the conversation and encourages the candidate to give you an honest recollection of what they actually did as opposed to what they think they should do.

At Workshop Recruitment not only do we consider candidates based on their experience and qualifications but we take the time to understand who they are and what roles would suit them best. This means that when we match them with you, we have already considered if they would be the right fit for your company, the team and the job itself.

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