What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence (EI), also called Emotional Quotient (EQ), is a crucial soft skill, indicating how one person understands and manages their emotional state while at the same time recognising other people’s emotions and empathising with them.

EI is comprised of five key components:

  • Adaptability – How well a person adjusts their behaviour and thinking in response to changing situations.
  • Communication – How effectively do they express their thoughts and emotions, and how do they receive emotional feedback from others?
  • Conflict resolution – How constructive are they while navigating and resolving conflicts?
  • Empathy – How they recognise and understand the emotions of others.
  • Self-awareness – How people manage their emotions, recognise their strengths and weaknesses and understand their values.

Emotional Intelligence in Recruitment

The most appropriate and timely method to assess emotional intelligence is during the employment interview. Although it can present a challenging task for the interviewee, the uncertainties it will resolve later on for the employer are priceless. Sometimes, recruiters find this procedure and these skills even more important than the hard skills and knowledge candidates possess. Because acquiring and practising essential soft skills like emotional intelligence is more time- and resource-demanding than learning to perform a simple technical task.

Preparing for the Assessment

Emotional intelligence assessment is a process that requires a few mandatory steps to provide the most accurate and adequate answers. Start by writing a job description that clearly states and demands emotional intelligence traits like empathy, self-regulation or social skills, and develop structured interview questions to simulate your working environment. This way, the candidates will have a quick overview of your company culture, and you will be approached by individuals who are comfortable with that specific level of emotional intelligence.

Creating a Job Profile that Values EI

Incorporating emotional intelligence requirements into the job description is a valuable first step towards selecting candidates with high emotional intelligence. A clear definition of the EI skills in the job profile also sets a clear expectation on the receiving end. It can help the candidates visualise their potential fit within the team and motivate them to demonstrate these qualities throughout the recruitment process. For example, the job profile should include: “A candidate with experience in a constructive feedback model”.

Developing a Structured Interview Process

Structured interview questions that build upon emotional intelligence provide a comprehensive approach to investigating a candidate’s qualities and challenges. Start by creating a series of standardised questions to better understand the candidate’s emotional intelligence. This approach ensures consistency in evaluation and minimises biases, allowing you to assess candidates fairly. For instance, asking candidates to describe a challenging situation and how they managed it can provide insight into their self-awareness and emotional abilities. We will cover the questions shortly.

Strategies for Assessing EI During Recruitment

Determining in which circumstances the candidate demonstrated high or low emotional intelligence is crucial for effective recruitment. Find out how they manage emotions by asking them to go back in time and explain how they managed team conflicts, adapted to rapid changes, or led the communication during a challenging project.

The next valuable step is the observation part. Follow them closely as they react to these hypothetical situations and how they revive these past experiences. Their expressions and body language can uncover how they manage their emotional state, thus ensuring comprehensive assessment results for your recruitment process. Let’s review a few strategies for evaluating high emotional intelligence, ultimately leading to more informed hiring decisions.

Behavioural Interview Questions

Behavioural interview questions are a powerful tool for measuring emotional intelligence. You can get valuable insights by encouraging candidates to share past experiences and demonstrate how they utilised their emotions. We’ve got some of the questions covered here, but you can follow the template to develop many more tailored to your company’s needs.

  • Tell us a time when you had to navigate through complex team dynamics.
  • Describe a moment when you successfully communicated an idea.
  • How do you prefer to build interpersonal relationships in the office?
  • Were there any setbacks in your career? Have you faced a loss of employment, an unexpected redundancy, or even missing out on a promotion? How did you overcome them?
  • Were there any strategic or leadership changes in your previous companies? How did you handle them?

If the candidate is a novice, there are ways to assess their emotional intelligence, too. Provide them with the same questions, the only difference being the phrase in the beginning: “Imagine if…”. Although fictitious, hypothetical questions can glimpse a candidate’s emotional intelligence and thinking patterns.

Situational Judgment Tests (SJTs)

Mimicking real workplace situations is an effective method of discovering emotionally intelligent professionals. Using situational judgement tests in your recruitment process, you can gain insights into their problem-solving and interpersonal skills. For example, if your company struggles with conflict-solving skills, design your SJTs around this subject.

Here is a list of possible questions:

  • “Imagine we lost a client. Colleagues start to blame each other. How will you resolve the situation? Where will you start?”
  • “You are witness to a team leader being disrespectful to his subordinates. But you are new to the company. Will you remain a passive bystander?”
  • Innocent chit-chats turn into serious gossip. Will you tell them to your boss?”
  • “Colleagues start to separate into small teams. Will you join a team and act from the inside out to gradually stop the process? Or will you create situations in which they will spend more time with each other, thus mitigating their segregation?”

Evaluating emotional intelligence through situational judgement tests clearly demonstrates the rationale behind a candidate’s choices and their ability to balance the outcomes. This way you will guarantee yourself a highly intelligent person who will create and maintain a harmonious and productive workplace.

Role-Playing Scenarios

By simulating workplace situations, such as handling a dissatisfied client or mediating a team dispute, you can observe how candidates apply empathy, communication, and problem-solving skills under pressure. This hands-on method provides a direct window into candidates’ ability to manage their own emotions. The result is a comprehensive emotional overview, assessed just by observing the interaction with their colleagues.

It would help if you focus on the candidate’s potential for active listening, responding empathetically, and navigating complex interpersonal dynamics. Pay attention to how they handle feedback and adapt their approach to others’ reactions. These scenarios will help you identify candidates who can deal with emotionally challenging situations and will also help their team in doing so.

Benefits of High EI in the Workplace

High emotional awareness and flexibility are the main components of strong emotional intelligence. They highlight the candidate’s potential to positively contribute to your company’s culture. Successful leaders are always great at managing emotions. They are better equipped to manage stress and navigate complex professional relationships, thus knowing how to provide support and motivation in a way that resonates with each worker. This empathetic approach can also increase overall employee engagement and job satisfaction, leading the company to higher levels of performance and retention.

Emotionally intelligent candidates can also act in high-pressure situations with clear heads. Whether they are interacting with internal or external people, they can understand their colleagues, customers and clients respectively, effortlessly bridging the communication and bringing trust between the parties. These competitive advantages of emotionally intelligent employees are crucial to a company’s long-term success.

Choose Olive Recruit as Your Staffing Solutions Partner

Here at Olive Recruit, we are always mindful of the emotional intelligence of our candidates. Besides the information about the required technical skills, we also provide you with an overview of their emotional intelligence, showcased in their candidate’s summary and their key skills. This is because we incorporate these questions into our interview procedure. We can also help you in delivering emotional intelligence training.

If emotionally intelligent candidates are your primary goal, we’ve got you covered. Olive Recruit’s emotional intelligence interview questions gather the information that will distinguish your future A-players from the crowd. You are encouraged to contact us and set up your path to recruiting success.