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Ask HN: How do test for emotional intelligence when hiring?

1 points by joshuamcginnis ↗ HN
One of the topics of discussion amongst my team is how we can better improve our hiring process to incorporate assessing emotional intelligence when evaluating a candidate.

We've seen great engineers struggle because they lack the ability to read the room or pick up on the vast amount of implicit information that humans by nature communicate when interacting in a large complex project or team. To be clear, I don't put all of this on the engineer - the organization absolutely has a role in defining boundaries and reducing ambiguity, but I believe it takes people who recognize ambiguity in the first place to make things better.

What are some ways we can better assess the non-intellectual, emotional abilities of candidates?

1 comment

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jppope
Emotional Intelligence is kind of a misnomer... there isn't really any scientific backing on the stated concept of "emotional intelligence" in the sense of the pop-science books such as (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emotional_Intelligence_App...) or similar concepts such as Neural Linguistic Programming.

But if you are trying to build a hiring "model" to define soft skills that fit into your system, that is very doable, but you basically need to build it from scratch since there isn't a really good framework. There is a LOT of good research on personality, so I would recommend starting there... if you're interested I can find some links but I'll probably just get down voted so... I'll wait for the request :)