Why soft skills are the key to performance and retention
3 minutes
Business psychologist, Ben Schwencke, explains the importance of soft skills in candidate selection and why you should measure them early in the process.
Soft skills like teamwork, adaptability, and emotional intelligence play a huge role in job success. Unlike technical skills, these traits don't reliably improve with training. They're rooted in personality, and personality doesn't change much over time.
That's why the saying goes: "Hire for attitude, train for skills." You can't teach someone to be resilient or collaborative, so those traits need to be there from day one.
Stop waiting until the interview to assess soft skills
But here's where most hiring teams go wrong: they wait until the interview to evaluate soft skills, by which time they've already invested significant time and resources in candidates who simply might not have the right traits for the role.
To assess soft skills effectively, you need objective data on candidates' behavioural traits before you start interviewing, not during.
Most pre-screening methods don't tell you about soft skills
In an ideal world, you'd run a structured interview with every applicant. Structured interviews, and competency-based interviews in particular, are one of the most effective hiring tools available. They're excellent at exploring how candidates have demonstrated specific behaviours in real situations, and at assessing motivation, values, and cultural fit.
The problem is that they don't scale. A structured interview takes 30 minutes or more and requires significant time from your team. That makes them impractical as a pre-screening method, especially when you're dealing with a large applicant pool. So you have to shortlist first, and that's where soft skills tend to be overlooked.
The methods typically used to build that shortlist give you very little behavioural data:
- CV sifting tells you what someone has done, not how they work with others or how they handle pressure.
- Cover letters are largely self-reported and easy to tailor. They tell you very little about actual personality.
- Application form questions can give some indication, but without standardised scoring they're hard to compare fairly across candidates.
Because none of these methods surface soft skills, the candidates who make your shortlist may simply not have the behavioural traits the role requires, and you won't find out until you're sitting across from them. Sometimes it's clear within the first few minutes. But by that point you've already spent hours scheduling, preparing, and getting there, and so has the candidate. That's a significant investment to make before you have the information that arguably matters most.
The data reflects this too. CVs and cover letters have low predictive validity of around 0.15 - barely better than chance - compared to around 0.58 for structured interviews. Your shortlisting stage is effectively running on information that doesn't predict job performance well. The soft skills discovery gets pushed to the interview stage, which is the most time-intensive point in your process.
Some teams may try to bridge that gap with informal phone screens, but these have their own limitations. Candidates can't be seen, making it easy for them to rely on notes or AI-generated answers in real time. Structured face-to-face interviews are the most effective method of interviewing - we cover what makes them more effective than unstructured interviews in another article - but as mentioned they are not practical at pre-screening volume. So we need another method to assess soft skills early in the process, which is where personality assessments come in.
Assess soft skills early using behavioural assessments
A well-designed personality questionnaire, administered as part of your pre-screening stage, gives you an objective behavioural profile of every applicant before anyone has spent time on an interview. Unlike CVs or cover letters, these assessments are designed specifically to measure the traits that predict how someone will actually behave at work, not just what they've done before.
How to assess soft skills (without relying on interviews)
- 4 minutes
Ben Schwencke explains his recommended approach to assessing soft skills in your candidates and what to look out for in your choice of soft skill assessment
The key is making sure the assessment is measuring the right things for the role. That means starting with your competency framework - or if you don't have one, clearly defining the soft skills that matter most for the position - and choosing an assessment that maps to those traits as directly as possible.
Pro Tip
A useful assessment gives you clear, unambiguous scores on the specific traits you care about.
Resilience: 7/10. Interpersonal skills: 4/10. Industriousness: 8/10.
You shouldn't need a psychologist or a 12-week training course to interpret the output. If you're looking at colour types, letter codes, or one of nine personality archetypes, that's not a useful tool for hiring decisions.
Personality questionnaires are also highly scalable. You can assess 10 candidates or 1,000 with the same scoring criteria, with no time investment from your team while candidates are completing them. Every applicant is evaluated on the same dimensions, which makes comparison across a large pool straightforward and fair.
This means that rather than discovering soft skills mismatches at interview, you can identify them before your shortlist is even built, and bring forward only the candidates who already demonstrate the behavioural profile the role requires.
This approach is particularly powerful for early-careers hiring
When hiring graduates, apprentices, and interns - where applicant volumes are high and work history is limited - CV-based screening offers very little. Paired with a personality questionnaire, the single most valuable thing you can add to an early careers pre-screen is a cognitive ability test. We mentioned structured interviews have a high predictive validity earlier, but cognitive ability is the strongest single predictor of job performance, measuring reasoning, learning potential, and problem-solving ability. Together, these two assessments give you both behavioural and cognitive data on every applicant, at scale, before a single interview is scheduled.
For experienced hires, where volumes are lower and candidates have a track record you can meaningfully evaluate, a CV sift followed by structured interviews is often a workable process. The pre-screening duo of cognitive and personality assessment becomes more valuable as volume increases and work history is limited and less differentiating.
Different roles and needs call for different soft skill assessments
There are several types of personality assessment used in recruitment, and the right choice depends on your hiring volume, whether you have an existing competency framework, and what you most need to measure. The table below covers the main options and when each works best.
Comparison of the different soft skill assessment types
| Assessment Method | Best For | Scalable | Key Strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom Personality Questionnaire | Organisations with established competency frameworks | Yes | Perfect alignment with your criteria |
| Workplace Personality Questionnaire | Most roles and situations (no competency framework) | Yes | Most versatile and comprehensive |
| Strengths Assessment | Culture fit, motivation, and team dynamics | Yes | Predicts motivation and satisfaction |
| Situational Judgement Tests (SJTs) | Complex interpersonal scenarios | Yes | Real workplace context |
| Role-Specific Questionnaires | High-volume hiring in common roles | Yes | Targeted for specific job types |
| Structured Interviews | Final stage, after screening for behavioural fit | No | Culture-fit and motivation probing |
The best approach uses assessments first and structured interviews after
Personality assessments and structured interviews aren't competing tools - they measure similar things at different depths. Used together in the right sequence, they give you both the breadth to screen a large applicant pool efficiently and the depth to make a well-rounded hiring decision.
- Every applicant completes a personality questionnaire (alongside cognitive ability tests) at the pre-screening stage. You review results and shortlist candidates who score well on the behavioural and cognitive dimensions that matter for the role. No interview time spent yet.
- You interview your shortlisted candidates using competency-based questions that probe the same traits your assessment measured. Because you already have a behavioural baseline, interviews become much more focused - you're exploring depth, motivation, and cultural fit rather than trying to establish whether a candidate has the right soft skills at all.
The result is a process where no interview time is spent on candidates who lack the foundational traits the role requires. The personality and cognitive ability tests will only take a total of 30-60 minutes to complete, which keeps the time commitment reasonable for candidates.
And now all your interviews are with the candidates most likely to succeed in the role.
Answering common questions and reservations
Let's address the concerns we hear most often about soft skills assessments:
"Won't candidates just game the system?" Well-designed assessments use sophisticated validation techniques to detect inconsistent response patterns. Candidates who try to manipulate results usually reveal themselves through contradictory answers across similar questions.
"How do I know these assessments are accurate?" It's important to use the right personality assessment, many are not suited for recruitment purposes. All our assessments at Test Partnership are built upon the best scientific principles and designed specifically for hiring purposes.
"What if candidates refuse to take assessments?" In our experience, serious candidates appreciate the opportunity to showcase their strengths properly. 92% of talent professionals say soft skills are just as important as hard skills (LinkedIn Global Talent Trends, 2019) - those who refuse are probably not the candidates you want anyway.
"How long do assessments take?" Most soft skills assessments take 15 to 20 minutes - less time than one phone screening, with far more reliable insights, and you don't have to be present for any of it.
"Should I still do interviews?" Absolutely! Your interviews will become more rich, as you're only interviewing candidates who already have the right behavioural profile. You can have focused conversations about cultural fit, motivation, and role-specific judgement rather than an attempt to establish whether someone has the right soft skills at all.
Conclusion and next steps
Particularly for early careers, the most effective way to assess soft skills is to use personality assessments at the pre-screening stage - mapped to your competency framework and combined with a cognitive ability test - to identify candidates with the right behavioural profile before you start interviewing. You then use structured, competency-based interviews to go deeper with the candidates who make it through, exploring motivation, cultural fit, and role-specific judgement with people you already know have the right foundation.
If you're ready for the next step and would like to find out more, here's where to go:
- Browse our complete range of personality assessments and see which ones align with your specific hiring needs. You'll find sample reports and technical manuals for each assessment.
- Not sure which assessment fits your needs, or want to find out more? Book a friendly conversation with our team. No pushy salespeople — just expert guidance on choosing the right tool for your specific situation.
We're here to help you make better hiring decisions, not to sell you something you don't need.
Primary author
Joshua Hancock
Digital Marketing Manager at Test Partnership. Over 7 years experience as a writer, content strategist, SEO and digital marketer.
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