🕊️ What are Soft Skills?
People differ in their social, emotional, and behavioral skills. These skills are often referred to as Soft Skills. They are interpersonal skills that characterize a person's relationships with other people. In the workplace, soft skills complement hard skills, which refer to a person's knowledge and occupational skills. Soft Skills like, for Example, Social Engagement and Cooperation Skills can help people maintain satisfying relationships and attain higher social status.
👩🔧 How do we assess Soft Skills?
Here at HiPeople, we assess most of our 40 Soft Skills with the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory by Soto and colleagues (2022) (short: BESSI).
The BESSI is a comprehensive, reliable, valid, and efficient measure of social, emotional, and behavioral skills. It measures five major skill domains, summarizing someone’s soft skills: Self-Management Skills, Social Engagement Skills, Cooperation Skills, Emotional Resilience Skills, and Innovation Skills.
👉🏾 Example
Skill domain: “Social engagement”
Facets:
Leadership Skill: Asserting one’s views and speaking in a group
Persuasive Skill: Presenting arguments effectively
Conversational Skill: Initiating and maintaining social interactions
Expressive Skill: Communicating one's thoughts and feelings to other people
Energy Regulation: Channeling energy in a productive way
👀 How does this look like for the candidate?
There are six Soft-Skill modules to be rated:
SELF MANAGEMENT SKILLS
COOPERATION SKILLS
SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT SKILLS
EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE SKILLS
INNOVATION SKILLS
COMPOUND SKILLS
Overview Soft Skill Facets (Source: Social-Emotional-Behavioral Skills Lab):
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Example Question
👉 Each module contains six Likert-scale ratings
Question format: “Please rate how well you can perform the above activity. Note that how well you can do something may differ from how often or how much you like to do it.”
Answer option: Likert Scale ranging from “not very well” to “extremely well”
🧐 Soft-Skills Can Be Measured With SJTs
Situational Judgement Tests (SJTs) provide a dynamic framework for assessing soft skills, offering a nuanced understanding of an individual's interpersonal prowess. These tests present real-world scenarios, challenging participants to navigate complex situations and make decisions that reflect their social, emotional, and behavioral understanding.
Through carefully crafted scenarios, SJTs measure one's ability to communicate, collaborate, and handle diverse situations effectively. By evaluating responses to these context-rich challenges, employers gain valuable insights into an individual's soft skills, enabling them to make informed decisions about team fit, leadership potential, and overall workplace effectiveness. SJTs thus emerge as a strategic tool for gauging the proficiency of soft skills and predicting how well individuals can apply these skills in the dynamic landscape of their professional roles.
Example Question:
🫂 Soft-Skills and Social Desirability
Want to learn more about how we handle social desirability in soft skills?
🧐 THE SCIENCE BEHIND SOFT SKILLS
Soto, C. J., Napolitano, C. M., Sewell, M. N., Yoon, H. J., & Roberts, B. W. (2022). An integrative framework for conceptualizing and assessing social, emotional, and behavioral skills: The BESSI. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.