The Hard Problem of Assessing Soft Skills

The Hard Problem of Assessing Soft Skills
June 06, 2013



In Part 1 of this post , I suggested that soft skills were misnamed. I’m okay with non-technical skills or “foundational skills” as one commenter suggested, but “soft” is too soft for something so important.

“Soft skills” encompasses more than personality, including traits like communicating with both techies and non-techies; the ability to plan and organize; drive and initiative; hitting budget and schedule deadlines; influencing and collaborating on technical and non-technical issues with all types of people; balancing and prioritizing work; dealing with changing circumstances; dependability; and coaching and team development, to name a few. That’s a lot of important stuff that is far from soft.

I’m not sure if it take exceptional technical skills to assess technical skills in others. This is a smokescreen. If true, it means that it also takes exceptional soft skills to assess soft skills in others. Maybe that’s why technical managers over-emphasize technical competency and give short shrift to everything else. From what I’ve seen the real problem is a lack of understanding of how technical and non-technical skills are actually used on the job. As a result, the wrong things are measured the wrong way, winding up with too much tech and not enough non-tech. As described in The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired, here’s the 4-step process I suggest using for assessing both technical and non-technical skills, whether the interviewer possesses either in abundance or not:
Covert how the skill or trait will be used on the job as a performance objective. For example, if a senior engineering staff position requires close collaboration with operations and product marketing to meet a tight schedule, the performance objective would be: working closing with marketing and operations lead the engineering design effort to launch the XYX EOIR optical product line by Q3. This is much better than saying, “must have 8-10 years in advanced state-of-the art optics design, a can-do attitude and strong communications skills.”
Use The Most Important Interview Question of All Time to assess the traits. First describe the performance objective to the candidate including both the technical and non-technical challenges. Then ask the candidate to describe some major accomplishment that best compares to this. This is called the Most Significant Accomplishment question (MSA) in Performance-based Hiring jargon. For the example above, some of the fact-finding would include getting specific examples of how the candidate collaborated with other functions, overcame schedule challenges, made technical compromises, dealt with setbacks, and organized the entire effort. This fact-finding can often take 10-15 minutes, but by focusing on realistic non-technical issues the new hire will likely face on the job, you’ll have the needed information to make a proper assessment.
Ask the problem-solving question (PSQ) to assess critical non-technical skills. The best people have the ability to figure out how to solve realistic job-related problems, appreciate the implications of different approaches, and know how to develop a workable plan before implementing a solution. There are a lot of soft skills involved in this, like being aware of potential pitfalls, what a plan of action would need to include, figuring out the required resources, understanding the technical challenges, conducting what-if business analysis, and knowing the impact on the people involved. The PSQ starts by describing a realistic job-related problem like, “we have to get the XYZ project done in 6 months instead of the 9 as originally planned. How would you pull this off?” The subsequent back-and-forth dialogue allows the interviewer to dig into all of the soft-skills associated with the actual job. The quality of the candidate’s questions are a key part of the assessment.
Complete the assessment giving equal balance to all of the hard and soft skills. I suggest using a scorecard to collect this information during a formal debriefing session. (Here’s a sample from The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired.) As part of this assessment it’s important to use specific evidence to rank all of the technical and non-technical factors, not feelings, emotions or intuition. For example, for meeting a tough delivery schedule I’d want to see multiple examples of the candidate meeting some comparable challenging deadlines. As part of this I also want to see if the candidate anticipated these problems and planned them out properly, or just reacted to the events as they unfolded.

This same four-step process can be used to assess technical and non-technical skills. From a practical standpoint you need to have both to be successful. Unfortunately, the problem for most interviewers is a lack of understanding of how the technical and non-technical skill are actually used on the job. That’s why step one – converting the skill into some measurable outcome – is the key for increasing assessment accuracy. Without this, the interviewer will naturally revert to a personal benchmark for technical competency or box check skills, and then make a superficial assessment of soft skills usually based on presentation, affability and personality style. This is a great way to hire “90-day Wonders.” These are the people who seemed great during the interview, but 90 days later you begin to wonder.