Perspectives on Talent | How to evaluate soft skills

Christy Harper:

Hi, I'm Christy Harper. I'm the partner and Founder of Archway Advisors, previously working with Wilson at Konica Minolta.  I think two things. The one is I truly believe in objective assessment.

Behavioral assessments are excellent. There's a variety of them out there depending on your needs. Different kinds of assessments are better for different kinds of jobs or different kinds of corporate culture or how you're going to use them going forward once you hire people. But those behavioral assessments are such an important, a more objective part of an evaluation process.

And I think personally, I think they should be in almost every evaluation process. The other piece is I highly believe in asking people to show me that they can do the job that I'm asking them to do. It doesn't mean that they have to do you know of presentation that takes 7 hours to research and write for three hours or that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about in a sales role asking them to sell whatever they're most comfortable selling.

Tell me what customer I need to be with. AI  can type in that customer. I can say, hey, what what are the best questions to ask so that I can be a knowledgeable buyer. I can be a knowledgeable buyer about almost anything for an interview purpose, but let them.

Let them sell the thing that's most comfortable to them. But you still get to see how inquisitive are they, How do they think on their feet? How do they handle objection? Those are the things that you need to understand on a salesperson and asking them questions is not going to get you the answers that you need.

You need to see it. And so between those two elements of evaluation are probably the most important to me because they really dig in to those soft skills or those humanity skills. You know, in the in the presentation, it's how does that person actually relate to another person, right? And in the behavioral assessments, it's how is that person wired, right?

Internally, how are they wired? Does not say that people can or cannot do anything. But it lets you understand is what I'm going to ask this person, is it going to add energy to them? Is it going to align well with where they get their emotional payouts?

Or is it not? Is it going to take a lot of energy? And if so, then you can ask them, how are you going to handle this? How are you going to handle this need within this role that is probably going to drain you from energy?

How are you going to put that back into your persona? You know, your persona? How are you going to regain that energy? And have really deliberate conversations, honest conversations with people about what the job needs and and what their experience in it is going to be like.