5 Best Soft Skills Assessment Tools for Hiring

October 12, 2023
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Hady ElHady
5 Best Soft Skills Assessment Tools for Hiring

As businesses continue to navigate a complex and ever-shifting global economy, the search for top-tier talent has intensified. The recruitment process has become a complex interplay of supply and demand as companies strive to find individuals with the right skills to drive long-term growth and sustainability. It's not just about filling specific job roles; companies seek candidates with a unique combination of competencies.

In the past, recruiters and hiring managers mainly focused on a candidate's technical qualifications, professional experience, and educational background as the main factors for selection. While these aspects remain crucial, today's business environment calls for a more comprehensive approach to finding the right talent.

Enter the era of soft skills—a significant transformation that has revolutionized the hiring process. Soft skills, including strong communication, adaptability, problem-solving abilities, teamwork, leadership, and emotional intelligence, have become paramount. These interpersonal abilities have been shown to play a crucial role in promoting collaboration, creativity, and employee happiness within companies.

Now, you might wonder the reason behind this sudden emphasis on soft skills. The answer is simple: businesses have recognized that technical expertise alone cannot propel them to success. While hard skills are essential, they are not enough on their own. Employees also need the ability to navigate complex interpersonal relationships, communicate well, show empathy as leaders, and quickly adapt to changing challenges. Today, employers can leverage soft skill assessment tools to evaluate all these qualities before making a hiring decision.

What Are Soft Skill Assessment Tools?

Let's start by understanding what soft skills are and why they are essential before we explore the top soft skill assessment tools for the hiring process.

Soft skills, also known as interpersonal or people skills, are a diverse range of non-technical abilities crucial for workplace success. These skills include effective communication, teamwork, adaptability, problem-solving, leadership, time management, and emotional intelligence, among others.

Soft skill assessment tools are specifically designed software solutions used to measure and evaluate a candidate's proficiency in these vital areas. Organizations can make smarter decisions, create stronger teams, and cultivate a positive work environment by incorporating soft skill assessments into the hiring process.

Benefits of Using Soft Skill Assessment Tools in Your Hiring Process

The significant benefits of investing in top soft skill assessment tools and using them in your hiring process are as follows:

1. These Tools Boost Hiring Accuracy

Resumes and interviews alone are insufficient to capture a candidate's complete skill set. That's where soft skill assessment tools come into the picture. These tools offer a fair and objective way to evaluate candidates' personal and social abilities. This standardized approach minimizes the chance of biased or subjective judgments in the hiring process, resulting in more accurate evaluations and minimal hiring errors.

By assessing candidates' soft skills, recruiters and hiring managers can better determine if they fit the organization's culture and meet the role's specific demands. This improved accuracy in assessing candidates helps ensure that the right people are chosen for the job.

2. Soft Skills Assessment Tools Help in Evaluating the Cultural Fit of the Candidate

The use of soft skill assessment tools can aid in the identification of candidates who share your company's values, culture, and mission. Hiring individuals who align well with your culture can increase job satisfaction and create a more harmonious workplace.

Employees who feel deeply connected to the organization's culture tend to be more engaged and motivated, fostering enhanced performance and long-term loyalty to the company.

3. Reduced Turnover

Candidates with soft skills like adaptability and effective communication are better able to handle organizational changes. By assessing these skills during the hiring process, you can find employees who are more likely to succeed in a dynamic work environment and stay with your company for a long time. Reduced turnover saves time and resources for the organization, as recruiting and onboarding new employees can be costly. It also contributes to a more stable workforce, improving customer relationships and enhancing the organization's reputation.

4. Improved Team Dynamics

An effective team depends on a combination of diverse soft skills among its members. Assessing these skills can help identify candidates whose interpersonal abilities align with the team's needs and the organization as a whole.

By bringing together team members with different yet complementary soft skills, you create an environment that promotes effective collaboration, encourages creativity, and minimizes conflicts. This ultimately leads to improved team dynamics and overall productivity.

5. Using Soft Skill Assessment Tools Can Help You Improve Customer Satisfaction

For customer-centric organizations, soft skill assessment tools are highly valuable as they can improve customer retention and increase revenue through enhanced customer satisfaction. Evaluating candidates' soft skills, like empathetic and communicative abilities, can assist in selecting individuals who are capable of fostering positive customer relationships.

6. Long-Term Success of Your Organization

Using soft skill assessment tools allows organizations to make informed hiring decisions that not only meet immediate needs but also align with long-term objectives. By selecting candidates possessing the appropriate soft skills, you can establish a workforce that excels at adapting to industry shifts and contributes to sustained success for the organization.

Strategically employing these tools enables you to shape the future of your organization by identifying individuals who possess the potential to grow and evolve alongside the company.

Top 5 Soft Skill Assessment Tools for Your Hiring Process

After learning about the numerous advantages of including soft skill assessment tools in your hiring process, let's now delve into the details of the top five soft skill assessment tools available today:

1. HiPeople

Top Soft Skill Assessment Tools for Your Hiring Process - HiPeople

HiPeople has earned its place as one of the reputed and trusted candidate assessment tools. Powered by AI, the platform offers advanced candidate evaluation and reference check capabilities to modern-day recruiters. HiPeople is known for its quick assessments and its culture-fit assessment features. Employers can use it to define and assess the candidates' values, behaviors, work styles, and other soft skills that align with their organization's unique culture.

HiPeople distinguishes itself through its extensive assessment library, which includes various types of assessments that cater to different job roles and industries. The curation of so many effective assessments allows organizations to evaluate the soft skills that are most applicable to their specific requirements. Whether you are searching for candidates for customer service, project management, or leadership positions, you can find a suitable type of assessment in HiPeople's library.

With HiPeople, you can evaluate a potential employee's grit, relationship-building abilities, expressive skills, and more. The best thing is that many of these assessments can be conducted in as little as 10 minutes! This rapid assessment capability saves precious time for candidates and employers alike while guaranteeing a smooth and effective hiring procedure.

Pricing: HiPeople offers multiple pricing options. Let's have a look at them:

  • Free package with basic features for 5 candidates per year.
  • A paid 'Grow' package at 20 USD/ month for 100 candidates per year.
  • 'Scale' package at 250 USD/ month for 1,500 candidates annually.

They also have customized plans for large businesses. Contact HiPeople to learn about their 'Business' package.

2. HireSuccess

HireSuccess is a helpful software designed to evaluate the personality and soft skills of candidates, ensuring they will fit well within your team.

The platform offers benchmark data, allowing you to assess candidates against industry standards and make well-informed decisions about their suitability for the position. Hiring managers can utilize HireSuccess to assess their current employees, establishing a benchmark for the critical soft skills required for a specific job or identifying any skill gaps within the team. They can then use this baseline data to evaluate potential candidates effectively. The ideal candidates will not only possess the necessary soft skills for the role but also be able to address any existing gaps within the team.

By using HireSuccess, you can evaluate various personality traits and soft skills of potential employees. This includes assessing their cultural fit, adaptability to change, emotional intelligence, and so on. Not only this, but HireSuccess also comes with a Custom Test Builder that lets you customize questions according to your specific needs. So, you can design the assessments per your company's hiring needs.

Pricing: Visit the HireSuccess website and fill out the online form to get a free pricing quote.

3. Clevry

Clevry is another excellent soft skills assessment tool that offers valuable insights into the personality, skills, and motivations of your candidates within the workplace. This allows you to gain a comprehensive understanding of your potential talent and their suitability for the role.

One of the best things about Clevry is its psychometric reports. The platform offers multiple reposts, such as personality profiles, onboarding assessments, team strengths, and leadership evaluations. You can use and analyze these to ensure your new hires are fully equipped to excel in their new positions.

More than 46 personality tests are available on Clevry for employers and hiring managers. Additionally, there are ready questionnaires specifically designed for industry-specific roles.

Pricing: Get in touch with the Clevry team to schedule a demo and request pricing details.

4. HighMatch

HighMatch is a sophisticated pre-employment tool that focuses on evaluating soft skills. Its main purpose is to pair candidates with roles based on their soft skills, personality traits, and values to ensure long-term success.

What makes HighMatch stand out is its experienced team of in-house psychologists who provide personalized insights into candidates at every step of the hiring process. They develop a customized evaluation plan that specifically focuses on assessing candidates based on the key qualities most important to you. And the best part? The assessment can be conducted in your preferred language. This allows employers and hiring managers to find the most suitable candidates for their organization. The soft skills measurement tool utilizes personality tests to accurately predict candidates' job performance.

The tool lets you evaluate seven unique personality traits, including adaptability, assertiveness, intensity, optimism, sociability, responsiveness, and structure.

Pricing: Visit the HighMatch website to request a pricing quote.

5. Pymetrics

Pymetrics is a platform designed to revolutionize the way hiring and talent management are done. With the use of data-driven behavioral insights and audited AI, it provides a fair and efficient hiring process throughout the talent lifecycle. It focuses on analyzing the personality and behavioral traits of candidates and helps employers look beyond resumes.

Pymetrics leverages gamified behavioral assessments to assess candidates at every stage of their hiring journey. Instead of relying solely on traditional methods like resumes and subjective questionnaires, the tool gathers objective data on cognitive and behavioral abilities to truly gauge individuals' untapped potential.

Hiring managers can use the tool's pre-built behavior-based games to assess the various soft skills of their candidates. This includes emotional behavior, personality traits, and cognitive skills. Additionally, this tool provides custom performance reports to measure soft skills.

Pricing: Contact Pymetrics for pricing details

Conclusion

As we wrap up our exploration of skill assessment tools, it becomes abundantly clear that they are essential for organizations looking to develop stronger and more resilient teams. In today's dynamic business environment, assessing candidates for not only their technical abilities but also their interpersonal and personal skills is a game-changer. As per a report by Wonderlic, a whopping 93% of employers believe soft skills to be an incredibly important part of the hiring process.

These tools enable organizations to make informed decisions based on data, ensuring that new hires are not only technically proficient but also possess the vital soft skills necessary to succeed in today's workplaces.

Among the soft skill assessment tools we reviewed today, HiPeople stands out due to its comprehensive approach and versatile assessment capabilities. HiPeople stands out as a state-of-the-art platform that assesses soft skills with the help of advanced AI-driven technology. Its main goal is to help organizations identify candidates who are the perfect match for their roles. The platform achieves this by placing a strong emphasis on measuring various soft skills such as communication, teamwork, leadership, etc. Sign up for HiPeople today and make your hiring process more accurate, effective, and successful!