How to Evaluate Soft Skills During a Job Interview

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are the interpersonal and emotional competencies that dictate how well people—employees, coworkers, and managers—communicate, work together, and operate in a professional environment. Unlike technical or “hard” skills, which are tangible, job-specific and easily measurable, soft skills are made up of personal attributes that shape how you work and interact with others.

These skills are valuable in all industries, often making the difference between whether you thrive in a wide variety of jobs and evolving career paths.

Defining Soft Skills

Soft skills are the combination of inter-personal traits and communication skills. They encompass characteristics such as quality of work, honesty, and punctuality, contributing to a person’s overall reliability and trustworthiness.

Just as critical to this is the ability to communicate—whether verbally or in writing—so that folks are clear and understand you. Examples like interpersonal skills, collaboration, and empathy further illustrate the connective tissue delivery professionals build to connect their teams to deliver desired outcomes.

Creative and analytical thinking is about how we analyze situations and implement the best solutions. Collectively, these skills work in tandem with one’s technical knowledge, powering measurable impact in any career field.

Why Soft Skills Matter in Hiring

Soft skills should be important criteria when determining cultural fit with your hiring. Employers want people who can adapt to team dynamics, build camaraderie among coworkers, and contribute to a fun, energizing workplace culture.

These skills shape team culture, creating an environment where open communication and respect for each other thrive. Crucially, tenants’ hiring managers consider soft skills equally or more important than technical skills, understanding how key they are for sustained success in the long run.

A candidate who approaches challenges with adaptability, empathy, and creativity is usually the one who rises to the top in a competitive recruitment process.

Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills

While hard skills are teachable, such as proficiency in software or tools, soft skills are intrinsic and harder to develop. Juggling these two skill types drives immediate career development.

Soft skills really help you get a leg up in leadership-type positions, or positions that interface with clients or other outside stakeholders.

Why Soft Skills Are Crucial

Developing people skills is at the heart of why soft skills are indispensable in the workplace. Technical skills might focus on completing designated tasks, but soft skills enhance workplace connections, foster engagement, and create positive outcomes for organizations.

These skills go well beyond the office. In addition, they affect every facet of life, making them essential for effective roles in any industry or profession.

Improved Team Collaboration

Excellent communication is the bedrock of effective collaboration. Articulating ideas clearly, listening actively, and providing constructive feedback stops confusion and misinterpretation before they start and helps get everyone on the same page.

For example, a team member who is an active communicator can help facilitate understanding between parties during collaborative group efforts. Empathy is key in helping team members understand and connect with each other’s perspectives, building trust.

Interpersonal skills such as patience and conflict resolution give you the tools to approach conflicts head on. They prevent disagreements from sabotaging advancement and actually improve collaboration among groups.

Enhanced Customer Relationships

When worse comes to worst, it’s readily apparent that soft skills directly affect customer satisfaction. Employees with high emotional intelligence have the ability to anticipate customer behavior, identify customer needs, and meet them effectively.

For example, a customer service representative who remains calm and responsive during complaints can turn negative experiences into loyal relationships. These soft skills encourage trust and help customers to feel appreciated, leading to improved customer retention.

Boosted Productivity and Efficiency

Clarity in message and intent improves efficiency by saving time and reducing repetitive work. Adaptability allows workers to adjust to changing requirements or embrace new technologies without missing a beat.

Working together increases output through collective expertise, allowing more to be accomplished more quickly and efficiently.

Better Problem-Solving Abilities

Critical thinking enables employees to identify hurdles and analyze them in an orderly manner to carry out successful solutions. Creativity encourages fresh ideas and inventive methods, and collaboration welcomes a wider variety of perspectives to create comprehensive solutions.

Stronger Leadership Potential

Emotional intelligence gives leaders the ability to relate to people on their teams, helping to foster a more caring and compassionate workplace. Clear communication develops credibility and inspires teammates while creating alignment with your organization’s goals.

Adaptability and resilience give leaders the tools to lead others through change with confidence.

Key Soft Skills to Assess

Soft skills are a critical factor in the hiring process, helping employers gauge how well a candidate can contribute to a team and adapt to workplace challenges. Beyond technical abilities, these qualities often determine success in both individual and collaborative roles.

Below are the essential soft skills to evaluate during interviews.

Communication Proficiency

Having the ability to convey information clearly and effectively not only fosters collaboration, but aids in conflict resolution and helps define expectations. Here is where active listening becomes so important, because it not only leads to healthier creativity and collaboration, but leads to less miscommunication.

For example, an effective communicator may take the time to explain staff expectations in a department meeting, saving time on corrections and increasing productivity.

Teamwork and Collaboration

Being a team player involves holding a shared commitment to collaboration that values all perspectives and contributions towards a common goal. Collaboration is usually the breeding ground for innovation, like a group brainstorming session that produces an unexpected but brilliant marketing campaign.

Employers love candidates willing to put the team above self-interest.

Problem-Solving Prowess

Analytical thinking allows you to approach problems in a systematic way, but creativity will lead you to find innovative solutions. For instance, addressing logistics bottlenecks along the supply chain by redesigning delivery networks embodies both skills.

Whether or not you’d admit it, employers are looking for people who can solve big messy issues.

Adaptability and Flexibility

Since dynamic workplaces require constant adaptation, the ability to change is essential. In addition, adapting to new software or workflows shows an ability to be flexible.

Employers love to see candidates who can improvise through surprises with confidence and a solutions-oriented attitude.

Leadership Capabilities

The best leaders communicate with confidence, demonstrate emotional intelligence, and inspire their teams. Whether it’s leading projects to fruition within sharp deadlines or training on-boarding talent, strong political leadership means creating an environment for professional growth and constructive trust among the team.

How to Assess Soft Skills

Evaluating soft skills during interviews requires a strategic approach to ensure fairness, consistency, and actionable insights. Soft skills, such as communication, adaptability, and teamwork, are vital for workplace success but can be challenging to measure. Various methods can help uncover these abilities effectively.

Behavioral Interview Techniques

Behavioral questions center on the candidate’s previous experiences to determine future performance. Request candidates to paint a picture of situations such as settling a workplace dispute or handling competing priorities. This method uncovers meaningful anecdotal evidence of their collaboration and critical thinking capabilities.

For instance, “Tell me about a time that you dealt with an argument from a coworker,” uncovers their conflict resolution skills. Create specific questions that connect directly to the position to make sure they are relevant.

Next, apply a consistent rating scale, like Workable’s five-level scale, to keep things unbiased.

Situational Judgment Questions

These questions give insight into candidates’ responses to scenarios that may require innovation and flexibility, evaluating critical decision-making skills. For example, asking a situation such as, “Your team is running behind on a project. What would your first three steps be?” focuses on their approach to solving a problem.

Effective situational questions should align with real job demands, such as completing a client design by month-end, to gauge practical application.

Role-Playing Exercises

This kind of role-playing allows candidates to showcase their ability to communicate and collaborate on the fly. Simulated tasks, like leading a team meeting, showcase their capacity to manage team dynamics.

Creating scenarios that apply directly to the role makes them more authentic, helping you get a better gauge on their true capabilities.

Personality Assessments

Personality tests, like the Big Five or Myers-Briggs, offer insights into traits like adaptability or empathy. Tools must align with job requirements, ensuring the traits evaluated match the role’s demands.

Reference Checks

References and evaluations from previous employers corroborate any stated soft skills. Specific questions about past experiences working in a team or adjusting to change create a more well-rounded view of candidates’ skills.

Effective Interview Questions

Asking the right questions during an interview is essential to evaluate a candidate’s soft skills. These skills, such as communication, adaptability, and teamwork, are critical predictors of long-term job success, often outweighing technical abilities. Research even suggests that up to 75% of job success stems from strong soft skills.

By framing targeted and well-crafted questions, you can guide candidates to share meaningful insights into their abilities and behaviors. Behavioral questions, which often start with “Tell about a time when…,” are particularly useful. Candidates typically respond using the STAR method—describing the Situation, Task, Action, and Result—which helps you assess their experience and approach.

Communication-Based Questions

Effective communication is the most important soft skill. Questions like, “Can you explain a complex idea to someone unfamiliar with it?” or “Tell about a time when you had to give constructive feedback” reveal clarity and conciseness.

Watch for answers that find a good level between depth and conciseness, demonstrating the candidate’s proficiency at tailoring their message to suit various stakeholders. A three-point rating system—Yes, No, Definitely—gives you a quick sense of their competency.

Teamwork-Oriented Questions

Teamwork and collaboration is a second major area of focus. Questions such as, “Describe a time when you worked on a challenging team project” uncover how candidates navigate group dynamics.

The best responses will demonstrate initiative, conflict resolution, and an eagerness to help others succeed. Google, for instance, seeks intellectual humility—the absolute foundation of great collaboration.

Problem-Solving Scenario Questions

Technical problem-solving questions, like “Describe how you solved a surprise problem at work?” gauge critical thinking. Candidates who can show the steps they took and the measurable results achieved are a sign of effective problem-solvers.

Top Soft Skills Employers Value

Soft skills are more important than ever, and they’re being recognized as the bedrock of success in the workplace. One thing is clear—the shift toward these non-technical abilities dramatically improves how you perform and interact with other employees in the workplace. Employers today prioritize candidates who demonstrate these competencies, as they ensure a smoother integration into teams and alignment with company goals.

1. Communication: Clear and Concise

Whether it’s communicating with clients, customers, or team members, strong communication skills are essential. Whether you’re presenting concepts in a conference room or writing a report, clarity helps make sure your audience understands your message and doesn’t have to guess what you mean.

For example, a project manager who communicates expectations and objectives effectively allows the team to avoid all of that energy in the wrong direction. Clear, succinct info always saves time and prevents confusion, helping all the work stay on schedule.

When it comes to working with others, the best communicators tailor their delivery to fit the audience, helping collaboration go smoothly.

2. Collaboration: Working Together Effectively

We all live and work in increasingly connected workplaces. Collaboration introduces different viewpoints, fostering creativity and fresh solutions.

To take one example, within a marketing campaign, designers, copywriters and market strategists need to coordinate to create effective results. When they are open to feedback, listen actively and attentively, and share responsibility for outcomes, collaborative employees create trust and focus energy toward achieving success.

3. Adaptability: Thriving in Change

Adaptability and a willingness to learn are more important now than ever in this rapidly changing workforce. Employees who readily adapt to change can face obstacles, such as moving to new tools or workflows, with confidence.

While under the constraints of the pandemic, flexible employees rapidly learned how to work together from home, ensuring projects continued to move forward. Flexibility allows for adaptability and agility needed for resilience in the face of rapidly changing conditions.

4. Problem-Solving: Finding Solutions

Creative problem-solving skills equip you to overcome challenges in a resourceful way. As an example, an IT specialist best recommended in resolving system outages helps prevent losses through downtime, positively impacting the organization’s bottom line.

A combination of analytical approaches and out-of-the-box creative thinking allows for establishment of root causes and development of practical solutions.

5. Critical Thinking: Analyzing Information

Critical thinking allows us to make better choices and think critically about the future. For instance, a data analyst might analyze customer trends to inform a company’s marketing approach.

When we ask the difficult questions and evaluate the evidence with a critical eye, critical thinkers lead to more effective results.

Demonstrate Soft Skills Effectively

Soft skills are probably the most important factor for job interviews. They demonstrate your soft skills and help to prove you would be successful in a variety of positions. This is true for employers, with 70% of employers valuing soft skills more than technical skills. This is all the more reason for your candidates to demonstrate these skills. Here are some ideas on how to demonstrate them effectively.

Use the STAR Method

The STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) is a great framework to use when answering behavioral-based interview questions. Providing a narrative that describes the situation, your involvement, what you did, and the results achieved, this method creates easily understood stories.

For instance, if asked about teamwork, you could describe a time you resolved a conflict among colleagues, detailing the steps you took and the positive result. Rehearsing using this approach in advance will ensure that you are concise and focused when you deliver it during the interview.

Share Relevant Anecdotes

Storytelling is one of the most compelling ways to showcase those soft skills. By including personal anecdotes, you will allow your responses to be relatable and memorable.

For instance, demonstrate your critical thinking abilities by describing how you discovered inefficiencies in a process. Next, share what you did to increase productivity. Choose stories that will best fit the role you’re applying to and showcase what sets you apart.

Highlight Achievements

Accomplishments do a great job of showcasing the soft skills you possess. Provide context for achievements by focusing on results that can be measured.

For instance, explain how your leadership on a multimodal project saved time by completing it ahead of schedule. Your skills become more tangible to interviewers when you back them up with quantifiable results.

Show Enthusiasm and Passion

A bit of genuine enthusiasm can go a long way in making a memorable impression. When you show your interest in the role through an upbeat attitude, intentional listening, and engaged body language, you demonstrate an eagerness to commit.

Employers such as Microsoft have a preference towards hiring candidates who qualify as open-minded and passionate.

Be Authentic and Genuine

Being yourself is a great way to earn the trust of your future interviewers. Providing authentic, unscripted answers as opposed to going through the motions with prepared responses is a hallmark of courage and candor.

Be yourself, but position your narrative to fit the position.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Soft skills are hugely important in job interviews, determining how candidates are viewed outside of their hard skills. Still, avoidable errors can sap your impact and create the wrong impression. Understanding these pitfalls and addressing them effectively can significantly enhance your interview success.

Generic Answers

Giving the same old cut-and-paste response only serves to hurt their credibility. For example, saying “I’m a great team player” just doesn’t cut it without examples. Remember, specificity is always the name of the game.

Instead, share an experience where you worked well with others, like when you found a solution to a dispute between friends during a group assignment. Personalizing your responses to the specific opportunity shows that you understand the role and company and are prepared, focused, and relevant.

Study the job description and come armed with examples that show how you fit their profile.

Lack of Specific Examples

Generic statements, such as “I’m a great team player,” fall flat without supporting details. Provide real, honest examples to support such claims. For example, explain how you analyzed and fixed a big problem or pain point from a past position.

Working through examples in advance will help make your responses more persuasive, as well as more organized and focused.

Exaggerating Abilities

Inflating your abilities sets you up for disaster when you’re inevitably asked to expand on the claim and fail. Being truthful is the only way to build trust. Sell your skills, but don’t oversell yourself.

Rather than claim you’ve developed the ultimate public speaking skills, tell them how you’ve grown after putting in the work. Please share a recent example of a successful presentation you’ve made!

Negativity or Complaining

Expressing negativity about previous positions or companies will generally create a bad taste. Turn failures into opportunities for growth. For instance, rather than throwing shade at an old supervisor, convey how their constructive criticism led to your professional development.

Poor Communication Skills

Don’t forget about the importance of clear communication. Don’t drone on or monopolize the discussion. Rehearse short responses and a fun trick called active listening.

Secondly, ask smart questions of your own to show you’re engaged, like only 1 in 5 applicants manage to do.

Scoring System for Evaluation

A formal scoring system is necessary when evaluating soft skills in job interviews. It provides transparency, uniformity, and equity to the evaluation process. This provides the peace of mind that all candidates are being held to the same objective metrics.

Without a defined scoring system, evaluations risk becoming biased, resulting in inconsistent outcomes that could ignore essential capabilities.

Define Clear Criteria

Setting clear criteria for soft skills evaluation shifts interviewers’ attention to the most important attributes to evaluate. Things like interpersonal skills can be evaluated through clarity of communication, ability to actively listen, and adaptability.

Look to Google’s emphasis on intellectual humility and curiosity for guidance. Arts organizations can adjust the creation of criteria to fit the unique requirements of the position. Having clear benchmarks helps not only to find but to score these qualities.

Use a Standardized Rubric

Using a predetermined rubric creates an unbiased scoring system that makes it easier to score and stay objective. Rather than a generalized 1-10 scale, a more simple 1-5 system is typically more effective, providing more explicit direction without excessive complexity.

For example, if the candidate was a poor collaborator, they might receive a 1/5 for teamwork while receiving a 5/5 for outstanding overall contribution to the team. Maintaining a clean layout, like having a single column per candidate, sets up readers to make rapid comparisons without muddled thinking.

Assign Weights to Skills

Strategically prioritizing soft skills such as leadership or adaptability can showcase the nature of the job. For example, in a leadership role, decision-making skills may have a 40% weighting.

A job in customer service might focus more on the ability to communicate with others. Continuously aligning the weights with the actual requirements of the job will keep the evaluation relevant.

Provide Detailed Feedback

Positive, specific and constructive feedback helps candidates build and improve upon their full potential. Support their development by acknowledging their strengths while advising them on how to improve things like eye contact or overall presentation preparation.

This method fosters trust and facilitates a learning environment.

Ensure Consistency

Providing high levels of consistency across interviewers enhances quality and reduces bias. Providing customized uniform scoring rubrics and holding regular calibration meetings are two ways to make sure you’re providing objective evaluations.

Best Practices for Scoring

Evaluating soft skills in job interviews can be subjective, so having an organized process helps prevent bias and make consistent decisions. Base scores on observable behaviors, not judgments to reduce bias and subjectivity. As you develop your process, continue to improve your practices to establish a consistent process to find the very best candidates.

Here are some simple, yet important, strategies to improve your scoring process.

Focus on Observable Behaviors

Scoring candidates on how they presented themselves in interviews gives you concrete evidence of their soft skills. Observable behaviors—like active listening, effective communication, and flexible thinking in addressing difficult questions—can illuminate interpersonal and problem-solving skills.

For example, a candidate that holds strong eye contact and offers compelling follow-up questions can show excellent communication skills and intellectual humility. These attributes lend themselves to measuring skills objectively and not just going off of nebulous characteristics or self-reported assertions.

Avoid Personal Biases

Too often, conscious or not, biases slip in and skew evaluations. Understanding all of these tendencies is key to staying objective. For instance, introducing bias toward candidates who look or sound like those already in power can exclude a wealth of diverse talent.

To avoid bias, implement objective scoring procedures. Choose a simple scoring scale, such as a five-point scale or the Yes, No, Definitely system proposed by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Utilizing tools such as Workable’s interview kits can help guarantee a uniform set of criteria for making evaluations.

Document Your Observations

By taking notes during moderated interviews, you can capture unexpected moments that will better inform your scoring. Take note of concrete instances, like the way a candidate approached a sample case, to inform after-interview discussions.

Don’t use blanket statements, but comment on behaviors that can be strongly measured, as these will support your claims during any appeals due process.

Calibrate with Other Interviewers

Shared collaboration helps us be more unified in the approach to how we write evaluations. Calibration meetings — where interviewers compare notes and discuss scoring discrepancies — are particularly effective.

These contractor-focused scoring sessions can better illustrate where alignment is needed and help refine the criteria used to score.

Review and Refine the System

A good scoring system should be a living, breathing program to be successful. Continuously monitor its effectiveness by soliciting feedback from entry-level interviewers and benchmarking output against the employee lifetime value of successful matches.

Working to refine the process as time goes on helps ensure its long-term relevance. Especially as technology such as ChatGPT renders pre-interview filtering increasingly complicated, hiring challenges only stand to get worse.

How Remote Work Impacts Soft Skills

Here’s how remote work has influenced our understanding of, and need for, soft skills. Yet transitioning to virtual environments creates new dynamics that force professionals to hone their interpersonal abilities in different but equally challenging capacities.

From virtual platforms to creative problem solving, these skills are the foundation of effective collaboration from anywhere.

Importance of Digital Communication

In distributed environments, effective communication, both oral and especially written, becomes critical, as you lose many methods of communication. Environments where video conferencing, email, and team communications tools become the go-to means of exchanging information and sharing progress.

Miscommunication can lead to delays or misunderstandings, so using tools like Slack or Zoom effectively is crucial. Whether it is holding a professional tone in an email or being able to summarize action items from a meeting, consistency and clarity are key.

Practicing active listening when having difficult conversations via Zoom will lead to stronger participation. With some practice, these habits can go a long way towards building team cohesion.

Adaptability to Virtual Collaboration

Nowhere is flexibility more important than in operations with remote teams. With virtual collaboration, you must play in a new ballpark of time zones, communication styles, and technology.

Being flexible, like being open to working asynchronously, or learning new collaborative tools (Trello, Notion, etc.) makes teams stronger. As an illustration, those employees who accept and readily adopt shared calendars and task boards foster better project organization.

This openness to change breeds more efficient processes, happier clients, and positive results.

Self-Motivation and Discipline

Remote work requires extreme self-motivation and discipline. In the absence of traditional office structures, creating more explicit goals and following specific timelines is even more important.

Methods such as the Pomodoro Technique or writing out a plan for each day’s tasks will improve concentration and responsibility. For example, chunking tasks into smaller steps keeps progress moving and creates productivity.

Building Relationships Remotely

Building relationships in online spaces takes effort. Considering regular check-ins, casual conversations in a virtual space, or even virtual team-building exercises through tools such as Microsoft Teams helps foster trust.

Small actions, such as recognizing a teammate’s efforts in meetings, build camaraderie and create a collaborative, encouraging workplace environment.

Conclusion

Soft skills are the intangible qualities that can win — or lose — a job interview. They demonstrate your interpersonal skills, your problem-solving abilities, and how you deal with adversity. Employers need these qualities to identify candidates who bring more than technical expertise—intellectual curiosity, creativity and innovation. By honing your communication, teamwork and emotional intelligence skills, you’ll be able to set yourself apart in any competitive hiring process.

The secret ingredient there is getting prepared. Work on telling stories that demonstrate your abilities. Don’t give cookie cutter responses. This is your opportunity to take a stand, so be clear, honest, and specific. Demonstrate how you’ve used these skills in actual scenarios. It’s not enough to tell the right stories—it’s all about demonstrating one’s true self.

Use this opportunity to learn what employers need and want. Always be willing to improve your strategy. Don’t underestimate the impact of these small steps, because they can open the door to big opportunities. Begin taking stock of your strengths this very minute.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are your interpersonal and communication abilities that dictate how you operate as an employee, team member and coworker. They encompass characteristics such as collaboration, flexibility, and EQ—emotional quotient. These soft skills are increasingly important for collaborating and relationship-building, two vital elements for succeeding in today’s workplace.

Why are soft skills important in job interviews?

Soft skills demonstrate how you work under pressure, work with others, and work your way through challenges. Employers highly regard soft skills, as they clearly determine the positive or negative flow of a team’s morale, output and environment. Having superior strong soft skills can give you an edge over other candidates.

What are the top soft skills employers look for?

Employers have consistently ranked abilities such as communication, teamwork, problem-solving, leadership, adaptability, and time management as some of the most desired skills. These softer skills go a long way to make you an effective contributor to a company’s success and the rapidly changing demands of the workplace.

How can I demonstrate my soft skills in an interview?

Provide concrete evidence from previous situations to support your argument. Use the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) to highlight how you applied soft skills like teamwork or problem-solving to achieve positive outcomes.

What are effective questions to assess soft skills?

Questions like “Describe a time you mediated a team conflict” or “How do you respond to constructive criticism?” reveal a candidate’s communication abilities. They go on to stress the importance of emotional intelligence and adaptability. Dig deeper with follow-up questions. Don’t just settle for the surface answer right away.

How does remote work impact soft skills?

Remote work places a higher value on skills such as communication, self-discipline and adaptability. These skills are essential to persisting engagement and cooperation in remote settings. When job searching, employers look for candidates who know how to succeed in these fields.

What are common pitfalls to avoid when showcasing soft skills?

Don’t be vague or give stock responses. Not providing concrete illustrative examples is a missed opportunity and a bad look. Making claims you can’t back up is another credibility killer business professionals should avoid. Make sure you support your assertions with actual examples.