When interviewing candidates as a hiring manager, it’s easy to get tunnel vision on the hard skills they’ll bring to the role. Of course, you want to onboard someone who can hit the ground running from the start, but it’s also important to get a feel for a candidate’s long-term potential, and that means getting an idea of their soft skills with good interview questions.

Soft skills help you gauge whether an individual will perform beyond the employee honeymoon phase. They’re the essential traits that contribute to 85% of job success when well-developed. The only catch? Soft skills are hard to quantify.

In this guide, you learn how to interview for soft skills to help you make the best hire for your team. Here’s what you’ll find:

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are social and interpersonal attributes that facilitate successful teamwork, such as the ability to communicate effectively, solve problems creatively, or adapt positively to new environments. They complement hard skills and are easily transferable between specific jobs.

Why soft skills are important

Soft skills are important because they’re human skills. No matter how technical or independent the role, soft skills are necessary for humans to manage themselves and interact with each other. Amplified across teams and departments, that ultimately translates to more innovation, efficiency, and profitability for the business as a whole.

A workforce with well-developed soft skills also helps organizations be change-ready. Not only is it easier to upskill employees with these kinds of capabilities, but employers who prioritize hiring for soft skills today are in a stronger position to navigate the inevitable disruptions of the future.

92% of talent professionals believe soft skills are just as important, if not more important, than hard skills.
63% of employees who received soft skills training said it positively impacted their job performance.
Soft skill-intensive occupations will account for 2/3 of all jobs by 2030.

How to identify soft skills needed for a given role

Which soft skills you prioritize when hiring for a role depends on three things: [1] company culture, [2] team dynamics, and [3] job responsibilities. It can also be helpful to reference top soft skills that remain consistently in-demand among employers in your industry or profession.

Be selective about which soft skills you’re looking for, so you don’t fall into the trap of assessing too many. Product teams, for example, might rely heavily on skills like collaboration and good communication, so a candidate who prefers working independently won’t be a right fit.

Last, but not least, it’s not enough to shortlist specific soft skills. You also need to articulate why you’re looking for them in relation to the role. Once you have that documented, share it with the recruiter so that the job description can reflect your desired capabilities and the interview kit can include that context.

12 soft skills and their benefits

Time management: Effective use of hours and attention to detail helps employees be productive.
Work ethic: Professionalism, self-discipline, and reliability ensure consistency in the workplace.
Communication: The ability to communicate clearly with colleagues, customers, and vendors is the foundation of positive working relationships.
Problem-solving: Unexpected issues will always occur and critical-thinking skills are necessary to come up with solutions as a team or independently.
Critical thinking: Engaged, active thinkers enrich solutions and are more likely to spot errors and drive value for the business.
Creativity: Thinking in new ways to solve problems is a competitive advantage for any type of organization.
Emotional intelligence: Self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy allows workers to navigate their feelings in constructive ways.
Teachability: Continuous learners are easier to retain through reskilling or upskilling, while contributing to business agility.
Teamwork: Most work across industries is highly collaborative and good teamwork is essential to successful outcomes.
Conflict management: Interpersonal disputes should never be a blocker to good work and managing conflict constructively is a huge asset in a hire.
Adaptability: Whether navigating a global pandemic, adapting to an emerging technology or a new boss, the ability to shift gears is essential today.
Leadership: Whether it’s as a manager, project lead, or executive, taking ownership and being accountable drives results.

How to interview for soft skills

While soft skills are harder to quantify than hard skills, the best way to evaluate a candidate for things like problem-solving and adaptability is through a frank, focused conversation. No automated personality test, AI tool, or assessment can replace a structured 1:1 interview with thoughtfully crafted questions.

As such, it’s important to use behavioral and situational questions. These open-ended prompts draw out real-world examples from candidates while allowing you to ask follow-up questions and track their nonverbal cues, such as body language, sincerity, and comfortability while answering.

Pro tip: Get the most out of your time with candidates using the STAR method. This framework encompasses four stages (Situation, Task, Action, Result) that help organize an answer through the story arc of context, specific challenge, action, and the outcome. You can ask candidates to structure their answers this way, or help lead them through each step.

10 soft skill interview questions to ask

Time management

Tell me about a time you had to prioritize competing tasks and how you managed your time effectively.

Evaluation Criteria: Efficient use of hours and attention to detail that promotes productivity.

Work ethic

Describe a time when you weren’t satisfied with your job. What could you have done–or did you do–to make it better?

Evaluation Criteria: Self-discipline and professionalism.

Communication

Tell me about a time when you had to deliver difficult feedback, either to a colleague or a team member. How did you approach the conversation? What was the result?

Evaluation Criteria: Effective communication and collaboration in-person and/or remotely using digital tools.

Problem-solving

Describe a specific problem or obstacle you faced in a project. How did you analyze the situation, and what steps did you take to reach the solution? What was the result?

Evaluation Criteria: Solving problems independently while keeping the collaborative components in context.

Emotional intelligence

Give me an example of a time when you had to change your approach in a new or different group of people in order to communicate effectively.

Give me an example of a time when you had to build rapport with colleagues or customers from different backgrounds, cultures, or professional fields. What went well, what didn’t, and what was the outcome?

Evaluation Criteria: Self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and inclusion of differences in others.

Teamwork

Describe a time when you had to collaborate with a team to achieve a challenging goal. What was your role within the team and how did you contribute to its success?

Evaluation Criteria: Flexibility, willingness to adjust to things like different time zones, work hours, and team dynamics.

Adaptability

Give an example of a time you had to adjust to a change you had no control over. What was the change and how did you react?

Flexibility, resilience, growth mindset, analysis.

Leadership

Describe a situation where you needed to persuade others to see things your way. What steps did you take? What were the results?

Evaluation Criteria: Strategic thinking, team building, and management.

Conflict resolution

Have you ever faced a conflict of interest with a colleague or vendor? What did you do?

Evaluation Criteria: Empathy, negotiation, mediation.

Integrating soft skill interview questions into the hiring process

Just like hard skills, soft skills should be evaluated throughout a structured interview process. Your role’s desired capabilities should be split up among the interview team, so everyone can share the responsibility of assessing candidates for these hard-to-measure attributes.

An interview evaluation form that captures the specific soft skills criteria you’re looking for in a candidate can help keep the focus on abilities over personality. Note, a clear scoring system is essential for tracking feedback across the team and quantifying each candidate’s soft skills.

Every step in your talent acquisition process should be fair and equitable. By asking the same questions of all candidates, it will be easier to make an unbiased hiring decision. This is especially important for questions regarding soft skills since the answers are harder to quantify.

“The [SmartRecruiters] system creates transparency about how we evaluate candidates in a structured way. It helps us make fair decisions across international hiring teams because everyone has all the needed information at the same time.” – PACCOR

Your recruiting software should make it easy for interviewers to assess and measure candidates’ soft and hard skills. SmartRecruiters’ top-rated talent acquisition platform offers hiring scorecards for more equitable candidate assessment, plus feedback reminders in Slack and Teams. Learn more about our collaborative hiring platform.