Emotional intelligence (EQ) determines how well employees understand and manage their own emotions, read the people around them, and navigate interpersonal situations under pressure.
In roles with a significant emotional or social load, it's often the difference between someone who thrives and someone who struggles - regardless of their technical ability.
Emotional intelligence underpins performance in any social or client-facing role
Generally, the more interpersonal the role, the greater influence emotional intelligence has on success.
The effects of low emotional intelligence
Employees low in emotional intelligence don't just underperform in interpersonal situations - they often don't realise they're doing it. They may misread emotional signals, respond inappropriately under pressure, or create friction without understanding why.
In team environments, low EQ affects morale and trust. In client-facing roles, it affects retention and reputation. In leadership, it can destabilise entire teams.
The roles where high EQ is most critical
Roles which rely most heavily on emotional intelligence include (but are not limited to):
- Medical and caring professions - staff need to empathise with those they care for, manage their own emotional responses, and communicate sensitively under pressure.
- Customer service and complaints handling - reading frustrated or upset customers accurately, and responding without escalating conflict, requires consistent emotional regulation.
- Management and leadership - managers who lack emotional intelligence miss signals from their teams, mishandle conflict, and erode trust. The consequences compound quickly.
- Sales and client-facing roles - building rapport, reading objections, and navigating difficult conversations all draw heavily on emotional intelligence.
- HR and people functions - handling sensitive situations, mediating disputes, and supporting colleagues through difficulty requires a high baseline of emotional awareness.
You can't train employees to have significantly higher emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is a stable personality trait. It's relatively fixed in adulthood and doesn't shift meaningfully in response to workshops, coaching, or awareness programmes. That doesn't mean those investments are worthless - they can help people understand their tendencies - but they won't substantially raise someone's emotional intelligence baseline.
If emotional intelligence is important for a role, the only reliable way to ensure your people have it is to hire for it from the outset.
You should not rely on interviews to assess emotional intelligence
Interviews are interpersonal, and emotional intelligence feels like something you'd notice face-to-face. The problem is that emotional intelligence is largely an intrapersonal trait.
Although certain traits such as positive expression could be measured with an interview, the majority of behavioural traits that underpin emotional intelligence are difficult to convey in an interview. Skilled interviewees could quite easily convince interviewers that they have high emotional intelligence, regardless of their actual level of emotional intelligence. This is particularly true regarding emotional decision making and level of empathy, which are especially difficult to honestly convey in an interview, but easy to exaggerate or outright lie about.
A second problem is interviews happen late in the assessment process.
By the time a candidate sits in front of you, you've already invested significant time shortlisting them. If a large portion of your shortlist lacks the emotional intelligence your role demands, discovering that in the interview is too late to be efficient.
Screening for EQ needs to happen early so that the candidates who reach your interview stage already have the behavioural foundation the role requires and you can focus on their interpersonal skills.
Personality assessments are the most effective tool for hiring for EQ
Personality assessments can be administered online at any stage of your hiring process, allowing you to screen candidates for their behavioural profile at the start of the application process.
They work by assessing the underlying behavioural traits that constitute EQ directly. Test Partnership's personality questionnaires measure emotional intelligence across five key sub-traits:
- Emotional awareness - the degree to which someone recognises and understands their own emotional states and what drives them.
- Empathetic - a genuine concern for others' wellbeing, and the ability to understand situations from their perspective.
- Intuitive - the tendency to draw on emotional signals and intuition when making judgements, rather than purely rational analysis.
- Negative expression - the healthy acknowledgement and processing of negative emotions, rather than suppression.
- Positive expression - the ability to recognise and openly convey positive emotion to those around them.
Together, these five traits capture both the intrapersonal and interpersonal dimensions of emotional intelligence - how someone manages their own emotional world, and how effectively they engage with others'.
Our questionnaire maps EQ across four dimensions: self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management (as shown below).
Conclusion and next steps
Emotional intelligence matters most before someone joins your team. Once they're in a role that demands it, your options for changing their EQ baseline are limited. Assessing for it early is the approach that works best.
Test Partnership offers several personality assessments that measure emotional intelligence alongside other core behavioural traits:
- The TPAQ-45 provides a full personality profile including all five EQ sub-traits
- The Emotional Intelligence Questionnaire is designed to be quicker and specifically focused on emotional intelligence
- We can also create custom personality assessments tailored to your competency frameworks
All are well-suited to the start of your assessment process, allowing you to progress only the candidates with the right emotional profile for your role.
Ben Schwencke
Chief psychologist at Test Partnership. MSc in Organisational Psychology with over ten years experience in psychometric testing.
