Culture Fit Matters: Tips to Assess Candidates’ Soft Skills

We’ve all been there. The candidate across the desk (or screen) from us looks like the unicorn we’ve been searching for. They have all the experience, technical skills, and education necessary to do the job well, and we snatch them up quickly before someone else can.

But once they have the position secured, the honeymoon ends, and we see that, although they know their stuff, they don’t fit in with the company culture. Soon, you’re on the hunt for someone to fill that position again because they left willingly or because you needed to let them go for the benefit of the team.

How can you keep that from happening again? The answer is that you don’t stop at the hard skills. Instead, once you know the candidate has the necessary knowledge to do the job, you move forward and begin a soft skill assessment to ensure they will be a good cultural fit. It doesn’t take long, but it’s an essential part of the interview process, and these tips can help you get started.

Tip 1: Recognize the Soft Skills That Matter

Soft skills were overlooked by most businesses in the 20th century, but the 21st-century knowledge has taught us that they may be even more important than technical skills in some aspects. Consider your unicorn from above. The fact that they know everything about the job was amazing, but if they never showed up to work or were constantly undermining the culture and causing problems, was their knowledge worth their salary? Likely not.

However, soft traits like dependability, problem-solving, teamwork, interpersonal skills, and time management are rarely teachable, while technical skills are. Still, these traits are industry-specific. What’s important to one field might not be as essential in another. For instance, in the tech industry, communication, adaptability, emotional intelligence, and time management are non-negotiables.

What core aspects of a candidate’s personality are integral to your company’s workplace atmosphere? When you recognize those traits, you can begin to assess them in future candidates.

Tip 2: Look For Employee Referrals

You’ve already established a successful workplace culture, and your current team wants to continue feeling satisfied, valued, and safe. A new and unknown person could rock the boat. But what if you were to ask your existing employees if they had a connection to someone who would be able to do the job and be a good fit?

Employee referrals account for some of the best candidates, especially if your employee referral programs are on point. Before you post your next job opening, keep it in-house for a predetermined period. Roll out your referral program terms as a refresher, and ask your team to post the job on social media or share it as they see someone who may fit the description. You may not get the quantity of applications you’d get with Indeed and LinkedIn, but the quality of diverse and highly-skilled candidates should improve. 

(If your employee referral program needs some tweaking to compete in today’s competitive and diversity-filled world, read this article by Obsidi®. )

Tip 3: Adjust Your Interview Questions

You have someone in mind who has the necessary hard skills for the job, and you think might be a great fit. What’s next?

The last thing to do is to use your interview time to check out their interpersonal skills and watch out for red flags that show you the individual might not adapt to the current work atmosphere.

Strong interview questions for soft skills are usually open-ended, such as:

• When you’re talking to someone who isn’t as tech-savvy as you and has asked you for a solution to their computer problem, how to do you explain a difficult concept?
• Imagine you were given a task to complete within a larger project, and you see a problem with the instructions that could affect the whole piece. How would you handle the issue?
• How do you juggle multiple projects with varying deadlines?
• Tell me about a time when you were assigned a project, and the client changed their objective after you started the work.

You may wish to create a rubric for each of the soft skills questions you ask, including a section of green and red flags. Listen to the candidate’s responses, and watch for answers that show how they adapt, communicate, and work with others.

Conclusion

Finding that one person who not only can do the job and wants to work for you but also fits in with the culture shouldn’t be rushed. However, it helps if you’re open about what you’re looking for — rather than just discussing the job position, share your company’s values and the work atmosphere expectations. 

Include a holistic interview process that tests the technical skills but also pays close attention to the soft skills. The extra time you spend finding the ideal candidate will be worth it when they stick around and stay loyal to your company longer!