How to Assess Soft Skills in Candidates: The Proven, Research-Backed Method

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 as they're rooted in personality.

That's why the saying goes: "Hire for attitude, train for skills." You can't teach someone to be resilient or collaborative, so it's important to assess those traits early.

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 may lack the behavioural foundation needed to succeed.

Structured interviews are highly predictive of job performance, but they have three big flaws when used as your primary measure of soft skills in candidates:

• Scalability problem: Interviews take 30+ minutes and require significant time investment from both you and candidates. As such, you're forced to be highly selective about who you do interview, and so you can only uncover the soft skills of those few that do get the chance of an interview.
• Time inefficiency: Discovering a candidate doesn't have the right soft skills during the interviews represents substantial sunk cost. As soft skills are so essential to job performance, waiting until an interview is an inefficient use of both yours and the candidate's time.
• Bias accumulation: When interviews are your only soft skills measurement, you're vulnerable to cognitive biases that skew crucial hiring decisions. The halo effect occurs when one positive trait (like confident communication) makes you rate all other qualities more favourably. The horn effect is the opposite – one negative impression colours your entire evaluation. Add interviewer mood and unconscious bias, and your soft skills assessment becomes unreliably subjective.

Fortunately, there's a better way.

Well-designed soft skills assessments (also named personality or behavioural assessments) can be just as predictive as structured interviews, and in many cases, more so.

Plus, they offer significant advantages that interviews simply can't match.

These advantages make assessments incredibly powerful for early-stage screening. For example, instead of spending over 5 hours interviewing 10 candidates only to discover half lack essential teamwork skills, you could screen 100 candidates with zero time investment from your team and interview only those who already demonstrate the collaborative mindset you need

And the best part of all? You don't need to be a workplace psychologist or data-analyst to administer or understand the results. The assessments do the heavy lifting, you get easy-to-understand reports that tell you exactly what you need to know.

So what's the optimal approach? Let's explore the method that gives you the best of both worlds...

Think about it: assessments and interviews each have different strengths. Assessments excel at objective, scalable measurement while interviews shine at exploring nuance, cultural fit, and motivation. So instead of choosing one over the other, the smartest approach combines both strategically.

From helping hundreds of clients, we've found the best method is this: Use assessments early to screen for behavioural fit, then use structured interviews to probe cultural alignment and motivation with your shortlisted candidates. That way, you only spend time speaking to candidates who already meet your behavioural criteria, and your interviews become more focused, consistent and productive.

Instead of hoping your interview questions will reveal soft skills issues, you'll know from day one which candidates have the behavioral foundation to succeed. Your interviews become strategic conversations about fit and motivation rather than detective work trying to uncover basic personality traits.

Now that you understand why the combined approach works, let's look at your assessment options...

Soft skills aren't one thing - they're a cluster of behaviours, attitudes, and interpersonal abilities. Different aspects require different measurement approaches, which is why there are multiple assessment types, each optimised for measuring specific dimensions of how people work and interact.

Want more details about each option? Read the full breakdown below, or book a call with our team for personalised guidance.

Custom personality questionnaires

Bespoke personality assessments that measure the exact behavioural traits that align with your defined competencies. These are built specifically for organisations that have already invested in developing their own competency frameworks and want their hiring tools to match their strategic approach to talent.

When to use: When you have an established competency framework and want maximum alignment between your hiring criteria and assessment results. This gives you the most targeted and relevant insights for your specific organisation.

Our solution: We create custom personality questionnaires tailored to your competency framework. You share your framework with us, our business psychologists map the relevant traits to each competency, and we collaborate to fine-tune the assessment. The result is a tool that speaks your organisation's language and measures exactly what you've identified as important. Contact us to discuss your requirements.

Workplace personality questionnaires

These assessments cover core personality traits that influence how people think, work, and relate to others. They typically include Big Five traits plus workplace-specific behaviours like adaptability, integrity, and stress tolerance. This is your most versatile option.

When to use: Your default choice for getting a well-rounded view of behavioural tendencies. Ideal across most roles and job levels, especially when you need insight into how someone is likely to behave and interact at work.

Our solution: The TPAQ-45 personality assessment measures 45 behavioural traits and 16 workplace competencies, giving you a well-rounded picture of each candidate's intrinsic behaviours.

Strengths assessments

These identify core character strengths and what naturally drives someone. They focus less on ability and more on the traits that help people thrive, stay engaged and find fulfilment in their work.

When to use: When you want to understand what drives engagement, team contribution and culture fit. Particularly valuable for roles where long-term satisfaction, motivation and values alignment matter more than specific skills.

Our solution: Our strengths assessment measures six core dimensions: Perception, Fortitude, Compassion, Collectivism, Integrity and Positivity. These are made up of traits like perseverance, empathy, curiosity and fairness.

Situational judgement tests (SJTs)

SJTs present real workplace scenarios and ask candidates to rate the effectiveness of different responses. They're useful when context and behavioural judgment are critical to job performance.

When to use: When you need to see how candidates would handle specific real-world scenarios, particularly in roles with complex interpersonal challenges or customer-facing responsibilities. However, we generally don't recommend SJTs as a first choice. They're more time-consuming, vulnerable to AI assistance, and offer lower predictive validity than other personality assessments.

Our solution: Our SJTs include versions for graduates, managers, sales and admin roles. We also offer bespoke SJTs tailored to your organisation's scenarios and behavioural priorities.

Role-specific soft skills questionnaires

We've developed role-specific questionnaires to make your life easier. Each targets the soft skills that research shows best predict success in that specific role. Rather than generic soft skills, you'll get insights into the exact traits that matter most for each role, with minimal time investment.

When to use: When you're hiring for common roles and want tailored behavioural insights without building a competency framework from scratch. Perfect for early-stage screening and high-volume hiring.

Our solution: Our role-specific soft skills questionnaires are available for 12 specialist roles: Admin, customer service, finance, hr, sales, management, apprentice, engineering, graduate, IT/tech, legal, and marketing.

Before diving into the practical steps of how to start implementing this approach, 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?" All our assessments are scientifically validated with proven track records in predicting job performance.

"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), so those who refuse? They're probably not the candidates you want anyway.

"How long do assessments take?" Most soft skills assessments take 15-20 minutes. That's 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! The double method approach means using structured interviews after assessment screening. You'll have much more focused, productive interviews because you already know candidates have the right behavioural foundation. Use interview time to explore cultural fit, motivation, and role-specific context.

With those concerns addressed, here's exactly how to implement this approach in practice:

1. Choose your assessment: Pick from our library of personality and aptitude assessments and add your selection to your hiring project. Not sure which fits your needs? We'll help you choose based on your specific requirements.
2. Invite candidates: Add candidate emails and send invitations in bulk (ideally as a first step when candidates apply). The platform handles scheduling, reminders, and technical support so you don't have to.
3. Review results and shortlist: Once candidates complete their assessments, reports appear instantly in your dashboard or directly in your ATS via our integrations. Use these insights to shortlist candidates who demonstrate the right behavioural patterns.

Then conduct focused structured interviews. Interview your shortlisted candidates using structured interview techniques. Since you already know they have the core soft skills, focus your interview time on cultural fit, motivation, career goals, and role-specific judgement.

The result: Instead of using interviews to guess at soft skills, you have measurable, consistent behavioural data from the start. Your interviews become strategic conversations with candidates who already demonstrate the right foundational traits.

To recap: The most effective way to assess soft skills in candidates uses personality assessments early in the process to identify those with the right behavioural traits. You can then focus your (structured) interview time on candidates you know have what it takes to succeed in the role.

If you're ready to take the next step, 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.