3 Soft Skills Interview Questions to Ask Potential Employees
3 Soft Skills Interview Questions to Ask Potential Employees
In addition to a person’s education and work experience, employers these days are also paying attention to soft skills. While technical proficiency and hard skills are important, soft skills show one’s ability to work harmoniously with others.
Asking the right questions will help potential employees display their soft skills. How they respond to these questions will in turn give employers an insight into their character, which is fundamentally what soft skills are all about.
Critical thinking questions The soft skill of critical thinking is the ability to think rationally and understand the logical connection between ideas. Ask the questions below to be able to establish if the jobseeker has this soft skill:
How do you make a decision even if the information you have is insufficient?
Tell us about a time you anticipated a problem, as well as how you mitigated it.
What does your current company need to change to keep you on its team?
What to look for: Willingness to adjust to changing priorities, unpredictable conditions, or unforeseen changes, and received with an upbeat disposition. This also requires emotional intelligence, which you can interview for here.
Adaptability questions The ability to adjust easily to circumstances that change unexpectedly is what the soft skill of adaptability is about. The following scenario sets the stage for the interviewer to glean if this soft skill is evident in the potential employee:
What are the greatest challenges you have experienced when starting a new job?
How would you propose and implement an innovation in an organisation?
Have you experienced a significant change in your life? What did you do to handle it?
What to look for: Willingness to adjust to changing priorities, unpredictable conditions, or unforeseen changes, and received with an upbeat disposition. This also requires emotional intelligence, which you can interview for here.
Communication skills questions The importance of receiving and relaying information accurately cannot be overstated when it comes to the workplace. The ability of the interviewee to answer the following questions will give you an idea of the level of their communication skills. Check out this link to see how to interview for communication skills.
Is it more important to be a good listener or is it important to be a good communicator?
Tell us about an incident in which you relayed the bad news to a client or colleague.
How have you handled being on the same team with someone whom you felt was not a very good communicator?
What to look for: The person listens intently during the discussion, and does not hesitate to ask questions for clarification. There is a good balance between giving specifics and general information.
Creativity questions Whether in the area of problem-solving or developing team dynamics, creativity has many applications on the job, making the individual contribution of team members critical. The questions below will help you gauge whether the perspective and the approach of the interviewee are fresh, or something that has been tried and tested many times over.
How do you come up with new ideas for projects?
What are some steps you would take to help your colleagues become more creative?
Tell us about a time when you had to come up with a unique solution to solve a problem.
What to look for: Depending on which questions were asked, the interviewee could discuss their creative process. They can also talk about how their ideas compared with the other options to show that they considered different methods and possibilities.
Soft skills are traits that are natural to a person, not something acquired through education. Because of this, measuring soft skills from a resume can be challenging. Asking for specific situations that illustrate the jobseeker’s soft skills is one way to assess their character, which is a good gauge of whether they will work well with the other members of your organisation.