6 Tips to Consider While Hiring Emotionally Intelligent People

Emotional Intelligence codified

Emotional intelligence is intelligence at a higher level and includes qualities such as

emotional awareness, empathy and perfect identification of other people’s moods as well as
managing the mood of the self. A leader’s emotional intelligence has an impact on the
workplace, as it emphasizes his or her personal relationship traits. In fact, leaders who have
high levels of emotional intelligence can easily communicate and work with all their
stakeholders – be it customers, partners or co-workers. This will eventually develop a
positive and productive workplace. In fact, if all the managers of the top management had a
high level of emotional intelligence, there would be strong sync within your team, thereby
empowering every associate to put his/her best efforts to make a mark. This would ultimately
help your business to overcome various barriers, thereby strengthening your organization to
reach the maximum potential.

So, what is the benchmark to know whether you are hiring emotionally intelligent people or not?

You have to assume that emotionally intelligent candidates put in their best behaviors to
impress and win over the interviewer. Of course, as a hiring manager, you cannot easily judge
how they behave in your actual work environment and what type of tasks can they
accomplish on a day to day basis. Also, you may wonder whether these candidates can handle
the stress, work under pressure and easily gel with the rest of the team. Generally, HR
managers focus only on the past experiences, skill sets and qualifications to assess the
suitability of the candidates without ever putting a serious thought on where do these
candidates stand in terms of emotional intelligence. Hence, you need to have a good
understanding of the various parameters of emotional intelligence to make a prudent
judgment about their emotional intelligence levels.
 Hence, when you interview the candidates, it’s vital to look for emotional intelligence, which
assumes greater importance, than looking for specific skill sets and experience.

To make things easier, we have presented a few tips, which you need to know before you can
judge to hire emotionally intelligent people.

1. Understand how they can handle the emotions

You should understand that skills can be acquired by training, but emotional intelligence
cannot be acquired easily. In this segment of questioning, check how they describe their
superiors or co-workers. Apart from that, also check if they had any conflicts or challenges
while dealing with various levels of associates. In case, if they fail to talk about the emotions
or understand the perspectives of others in a specific scenario, it’s likely that they do not
possess self-awareness or understand how feelings and emotions have a major role in their
work lives.

2. Talk to the references directly

It’s better to directly talk to the candidates’ references, instead of just relying on paper-based
recommendations. Interview and ask any potential references about how these candidates had
performed in a team environment in their respective companies, particularly their behaviors
during meetings or the approaches they had followed to resolve the conflicts. Also, you can
check if these candidates are good at reading and reacting to others’ feelings or can easily sail
through challenging interpersonal relationships.

3. Don’t just rely on theoretical personality tests

Experts believe that the personality test is not the right barometer to measure emotional
intelligence. It’s a common psychology of candidates to answer questions of a personality test
in a realistic way, irrespective of whether those answers actually describe them. Hence, it’s
quite difficult to assess from these tests, whether someone can read emotions and react in the
right way.

4. Understand whether the candidates have the right degree of self-motivation

Generally, it is the nature of emotionally intelligent people to be tough when they encounter
any challenging situations. It is better to derive insights about their intrinsic natures to know
whether they are really self-motivated in general and also how they behave during
challenging circumstances and failures. In this context, self-motivation should be inbuilt,
rather than fluctuating (increasing) with respect to salary increases, bonuses or promotions.
This is the most important parameter to look and only a highly self-motivated person can be
the right fit for your organization.

5. Gauge their strengths and weaknesses

Assessing the candidates’ respective strengths and weaknesses in a judicious way helps you to
pick up the right candidates, who can fit into the respective roles. Hence, it is imperative to
understand their individual strengths and weaknesses and showcase these strengths in a
healthy way. In fact, the best way is to get insights into their intrinsic behaviors by judging
whether they are egoistic about their strengths or honest and open when they talk about their
weaknesses. Hence, it is better than the candidates are self-aware and are able to receive
criticism or feedback from a positive perspective as well as learn from their mistakes as
associates.
6. Are they empathetic?

A person who is compassionate and shares a strong emotional understanding is critical to the
overall development of the company while fostering a healthy work culture. This is one of the
toughest attributes to assess someone in the interview. You can ask questions to assess their
levels of empathy to check how they have executed their tasks within a team setup earlier and
try to obtain insights into their responses. Based on the replies you receive, you can easily
judge whether they share genuine compassion and empathy to fit in within a team
environment.

The bottom line is to develop a company filled with emotionally intelligent associates at all
levels. If each and every associate really puts in the efforts in developing a good emotional
quotient, a company could significantly benefit with likeminded people, who share the same
thought process and the best part is travel on the same wavelength across the organizational
success.