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:

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 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.

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.

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.