If I were running a company today, I would have one priority above all others: to acquire as many of the best people as I could [because] the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people.
— Jim Collins, Growth & Management Guru
Do you find it difficult to evaluate soft skills or conduct behavioral interviews? Soft skills, as defined by the Collins Dictionary, are “desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge.” Another study defined them more concretely as “interpersonal skills and personal (career) attributes.” While assessing technical skills tends to be straightforward due to the educational curriculum, soft skills are rarely formally broken down in a similar manner. This often results in difficulty in grasping how to consistently evaluate the so-called “soft skills.”
As software becomes increasingly complex, almost all jobs require a high degree of collaboration. According to a study conducted by Harvard University, 80% of career achievements are determined by soft skills and only 20% by hard skills. Consequently, the ability to properly identify and evaluate soft skills during the recruiting process is increasingly critical. This is the first of a series on how to effectively assess soft skills.
1. Define company values
“If I could go back and do Zappos all over again, I would actually come up with our values from day one. We actually didn’t always have values. It wasn’t until about five years into it that we rolled out our values.”
— Tony Hsieh, Founder & CEO of Zappos (acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion in 2009)
Values are guiding principles for how members of the company think and operate. Defining a set of core values is the first step to establishing common ground on how to evaluate candidates. With the right set of values, the principles should remain similar over time. For example, Google’s 10 values have barely changed over the last 20 years.
Although many companies have core values, few align actions with them. In order for values to be effective, they need to be thoughtfully defined and reflect the actions taken by the employees.
For instance, Flatiron Health operates in the intersection of healthcare and technology. Entrepreneurially-minded software engineers often move faster whereas healthcare personnel needs to double-check everything before taking any actions. To balance both sides, one of their values is to give and receive 30% feedback. This allows tech-oriented employees to iterate quickly while providing healthcare folks the ability to verify the approach early on in a project.
Establishing values provides us with a common baseline and guidance on how employees should act. This is a prerequisite to effectively assessing soft skills: it gives us a shared standard to evaluate against. Since this post primarily focuses on assessing soft skills, I won’t delve much more into how to create company values. For further reading, I recommend the following articles:
- Three Reasons Why Values Matter, And I’m Not Talking The Money Kind
- Aligning Action and Values
- Startup Culture: Value v.s. Vibe
2. Evaluate against company values
“We wanted to come up with committable core values. And by committable, meaning we’re actually willing to hire or fire people based on whether they’re living up to those values, completely independent of their actual job performance.”
— Tony Hsieh
A common misconception when evaluating the company or cultural fit is “Would I grab a beer with him?” or “Did I enjoy my conversation with her?” Studies have shown what people loosely refer to as “cultural fit” is often just a code word for saying “is the person like me?” This often leads to discrimination and lack of diversity, which has been shown to hurt business.
After the core values are defined, a company should evaluate their candidates across those values. Suppose that your company emphasizes transparency. During the interview, you might try to assess whether the candidate demonstrated that value when discussing the re-org he planned at his last job. At Amazon, candidates go through bar raiser interviews, which assess whether the candidates possess Amazon’s 14 leadership principles, such as customer obsession and ownership.
Evaluation of the core values is not limited to only the designated behavioral or bar raiser interviews. At Flatiron Health, we had a dedicated section in all interview scorecards to assess whether the candidate demonstrated any of the core values. Let’s say the candidate adequately designed and prioritized the various workflows for my data modeling question. I may then give her a 4 out of 5 for the “solving problems that matter” value.
On the other hand, I have seen companies with scorecards with a generic “culture fit” to encompass all non-technical attributes. Unfortunately, each interviewer has his or her own definition of what “culture fit” means. In the interview feedback scorecard and hiring committee meetings, I’d read or hear comments like “I really enjoyed my conversation with Ross so I can see myself working with him” or “Sonia’s description of her last job reminds me of Jess so I think she’d be a good fit at our company.” This lack of shared values during recruiting made it difficult to evaluate each candidate methodically and consistently.
3. Align on the (soft) skills to evaluate
“Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.”
— Jim Collins
Contrary to values, which are company-wide, skills are role-specific. They should be something that is critical to perform the role. For example, a company looking to fill a product manager position may look for cross-functional collaboration skills, but not do the same for an accountant.
It is critical to align on the set of skills needed for the job. When I was at Palantir, one of the key skillsets for forward deployed engineers was holistic and critical thinking. In other words, when getting a request from a client, the first reaction is to go back to first principles and ask “Is this the right problem to solve?” and not “How should I solve this problem?”
In the earlier days, we primarily evaluated technical ability such as algorithms and data structures and relied on in-house training for holistic and critical thinking skills. However, a few years ago, we recognized that filtering for critical thinking was necessary as the company expanded. Accordingly, we designed interview questions where we intentionally provided an ambiguous problem to assess how candidates approached it, allowing us to select for the attribute. This was possible because we all agreed to evaluate holistic and critical thinking.
On the other hand, I’ve also been involved in the search for a Head of Department role where different people had different ideas of what the job would entail. Some thought the role was primarily responsible for org-building and people management, whereas others wanted a strong technical mentor. Some scoffed at candidates with fewer than 15 years of experience, while our sourcer kept bringing candidates onsite with 5. The result was that we spent almost a year but still couldn’t find that unicorn executive who satisfied all requirements from all parties.
Evaluating soft skills shouldn’t be arbitrary or at the whim of the interviewer. Quite the opposite: companies should clearly define their values and skillsets for the job and evaluate against them methodically. In my next post, I will discuss a few specific types of questions I have found to be effective when assessing values and skills.
If you enjoyed this article, check out the following articles in this series:
- Part 2: 3 Types of Questions to Assess Soft Skills Effectively
- Part 3: 3 Steps to Assess Your Prospective Employer’s Culture
For more musings on tech culture, organization building, and management, follow me on Twitter @kenk616.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +421,678 people.
Subscribe to receive our top stories here.
