How to Evaluate a Job Candidate's Emotional Intelligence

A high IQ can be handy, but a high EQ is what really helps move entire teams forward. Emotional intelligence is the ability to manage your own emotions and the emotions of the people around you. It means you have empathy for others and can address their needs appropriately, even when you might be distressed yourself.

If you’ve ever been interviewed for a job and walked in nervously only to have your interviewer have you laughing and completely at ease by the end of your conversation, you know the power of one person with emotional intelligence.

But how do you evaluate something like that? “Do you have emotional intelligence? Y/N” obviously isn’t going to cut it.

Good interview questions.

Yes, you need to spend some of the interview ascertaining the candidate’s experience, work and organizational style, and decision-making process. But you also need to allocate some of that time to assessing their social skills, emotional regulation, and ability to work with different kinds of people. Behavioral interview questions that assess emotional intelligence include questions like:

• “Tell me about your most frustrating coworker.”
• “Who is someone at your last job that you really admired? Why them?”
• “Tell me about your day from hell. What happened?”
• “Talk to me about a time when a project you were working on failed. What went wrong? How did you move forward after that?”
• “What was the dynamic like on your last team? How did you navigate that?”

If there are specific personalities you know this person will be working with in the role they’re applying for, you can also direct some questions specifically in this direction. “Tell me about a time when you’ve worked with someone who hated the appearance of conflict. How did you manage that relationship?”

Good reference checks.

When speaking with previous employers, don’t stop at whether they were able to manage the database, ask about their ability to work with others. How did they manage stress? Were they helpful to colleagues? Of course, your candidate left this employer for a reason, so there’s a chance you might hear back something that’s not entirely reflective of reality. But this is why it’s so important to check multiple references. If three employers say that the candidate was a strong and empathetic team leader and one says they were an arrogant micromanager, the odds are good that the bigger problems were with the workplace, not the employee. Still, this is the sort of thing to ask the candidate about. If their explanation jives with your impression (they inherited an incompetent team and were forbidden to terminate or discipline them in any way, for example), you can move forward with less anxiety.

Behavioral science has taught us a lot about hiring the right people.

From personality to empathy to learning style, we can now take so much more into account when hiring than just “Do they have the skills?” and “Do I like them?” Interested in learning more? Download The Benefits of Scientific Hiring.