How to measure a job candidate’s emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an important yet often overlooked quality in job candidates. It helps employees empathize with customers and provide above-and-beyond service. It also enables employees to work in teams and avoid conflicts that harm productivity. However, hiring an applicant lacking emotional intelligence could lead to negative customer interactions and strife between colleagues.

While most hiring managers know how to measure applicants’ hard skills, evaluating emotional intelligence can be challenging.

In this guide, we explain how to assess candidates’ emotional intelligence and provide actionable tips to ensure you always make the right hire for your business.

What is emotional intelligence, and why does it matter in the workplace?

Emotional intelligence describes an individual’s ability to control their emotions and understand the emotions of others around them.

People with high emotional intelligence can recognize their emotions, interpret them, and effectively manage their behavior in response to them. Additionally, emotionally intelligent individuals can understand how their actions impact others – partly through their ability to identify the emotions of those around them.

Emotional intelligence is also critical to employees’ success in the workplace. Let’s look at some key benefits of emotional intelligence at work.

Increased customer satisfaction

Research shows that emotional intelligence plays an important role in customer satisfaction. The more emotionally intelligent a customer-facing employee is, the more likely customers are to say they had a positive experience with a business.

That’s important because customer satisfaction is one of the major determinants of whether a customer will return to your business in the future. Emotionally intelligent employees in critical roles can help supercharge your business, while employees with low emotional intelligence might drag down future sales.

Enhanced productivity in teams

Employees with high emotional intelligence typically work well in teams. They’re able to avoid and solve conflicts because they understand how their behavior impacts colleagues.

For example, say an employee wants to change a process that’s been in place at your company for several years. An emotionally intelligent employee is likely to work with others to make the transition smoother and ensure no one’s feelings are hurt.

On the other hand, an employee with low emotional intelligence might implement a change with little input or warning. That’s likely to cause tension within your business that can harm productivity and even make other employees consider leaving your company.

Employees who aren’t in managerial roles can also benefit from high emotional intelligence. For instance, when providing feedback to a colleague, an emotionally intelligent employee is better able to make their criticism constructive. An employee lacking emotional intelligence may use destructive criticism that hurts teammates, which isn’t productive.

Reduced employee turnover

Emotionally intelligent employees tend to have higher job satisfaction and reduced stress at work. These employees are less likely to leave your company, which benefits you since employee resignations can hold back productivity and require costly hiring campaigns to replace the workers who left.

Better communication in the workplace

Emotional intelligence is the bedrock of good communication in the workplace. Employees need to understand how their words and actions affect others in order to share effective feedback and make colleagues and subordinates feel valued.

Improved communication rooted in emotional intelligence can lead to better teamwork, higher productivity, and greater harmony within your workplace.

Enhanced problem solving

Problem-solving skills also benefit from emotional intelligence. That’s because emotionally intelligent employees are better at sharing ideas, accepting feedback and criticism, and thinking outside the box. 

Teams that are better at problem-solving can help your business innovate and find ways around challenges holding back growth.

How to hire for emotional intelligence

Hiring for emotional intelligence requires going beyond asking standard questions about a candidate’s job qualifications to understanding the soft skills they can bring to your business. To hire for emotional intelligence, you must understand how to measure emotional intelligence.

The best way to measure emotional intelligence is to use pre-employment testing. Pre-employment tests enable you to learn more about candidates than their resumes and interviews alone can tell you.

Below, we cover four strategies you can incorporate into your hiring process to find emotionally intelligent candidates.

Use personality tests

Personality testing is one of the best ways to evaluate a candidate’s emotional intelligence during hiring. Personality tests ask candidates to respond candidly to specific situations or statements and help you interpret their responses.

You can use TestGorilla to administer personality tests during the hiring process. Our library of 300+ pre-employment tests includes the DISC and Big 5 (OCEAN) personality tests.

Both tests measure an applicant’s conscientiousness, which is closely related to emotional intelligence. Highly conscientious individuals tend to be diplomatic, precise with language, and analytical in nature. These traits help individuals understand the feelings of those around them and respond appropriately.

Our personality tests take only about 10 minutes to complete, and you can combine them with role-specific skills tests to find the best candidate for every open position at your company. 

Ask behavioral interview questions

Behavioral interview questions are another powerful tool for measuring emotional intelligence.

These questions ask applicants to describe their past experiences and explain how they would respond to situations they might encounter on the job. The goal isn’t to test their technical knowledge but rather to understand their motivations, emotions, and behaviors in the workplace.

TestGorilla enables you to add custom behavioral interview questions to any assessment, making it easy to pair these questions with personality testing. 

Some behavioral interview questions to assess emotional intelligence include:

• Have you had to calm an angry customer in the past? How did you do it?

• How do you resolve disagreements with team members?

• What do you do if you have to work with someone you don’t get along with?

• What do you do to motivate yourself and other people on your team?

Talk to a candidate’s references

A candidate’s former managers can also provide helpful insight into their emotional intelligence.

Ask references to give frank examples of times when an applicant demonstrated high or low emotional intelligence in the workplace. You can also ask them about a candidate’s interactions with colleagues and whether they were able to work smoothly in teams.

Conduct a job simulation

Particularly when hiring for customer-facing roles, it can be helpful to conduct a job simulation to evaluate a candidate’s emotional intelligence. These simulations can be as simple as role-playing during an interview, with the applicant taking on the job role they’re interviewing for and you taking on the role of an upset customer.

This type of simulation can be very illuminating. You get to see for yourself how an applicant might try to defuse a situation or empathize with a customer to find a positive solution to the scenario. If a candidate gets angry or shrugs off the simulated customer’s concerns, that could indicate low emotional intelligence. 

Jobs that require high emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is important in almost every job role. Even employees who work alone much of the time must occasionally interface with supervisors, colleagues, or employees in other departments. When they do, they must have the emotional intelligence to work productively with others.

That said, some job roles require especially high emotional intelligence. These include customer-facing roles, positions that require a lot of personal interactions, and jobs that can be emotionally taxing, such as nursing or social care.

Job categories where candidates' emotional intelligence should be carefully considered include:

• Human resources

• Counseling

• Teaching

• Nursing

• Social work

• Customer service

• Coaching

• Public relations

Additionally, any role that involves managing teams can benefit greatly from an employee with high emotional intelligence.

Find emotionally intelligent candidates with TestGorilla

Emotional intelligence is a soft skill crucial for increasing customer satisfaction, boosting productivity, and reducing employee turnover. It’s important to understand how to measure emotional intelligence during your hiring process to ensure you always hire the best people for your open roles.

TestGorilla makes assessing applicants’ emotional intelligence easy with personality tests and behavioral interview questions.

Start evaluating your applicants’ emotional intelligence by signing up for a free TestGorilla account today and creating your first assessment from our library of more than 300 tests.