Should I Test for Emotional Intelligence During Recruitment?

YES. Testing for Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is important as it helps assess candidates' ability to control their own emotions and their ability to empathetically interact with others.

Emotional intelligence refers to a person’s ability to recognise and manage emotions in others and themselves. It is the ability to understand how their own, and other's, behaviour affects people emotionally. EQ can play a significant role in job performance as it impacts how individuals handle interpersonal relationships, cope with stress, and navigate workplace dynamics.

Over the previous two decades, EQ has attracted much attention in both popular and academic literature. Two distinct conceptualisations of EQ emerged during this time that attempt to broadly define EQ and guide its measurement: an ability-based model and trait-based model. The ability-based approach views EQ as a type of intelligence, akin to cognitive ability, and utilises performance-based assessment. The trait model views EQ more like personality and assesses it via self-report measures. The ability-based approach is more suited to recruitment contexts than the self-report approach. Research over the past decade has found evidence for ability-based EQ being related to higher job performance across numerous job roles and populations.

We recommend using “Emotify” from Criteria. It is an ability-based measure of emotional intelligence that assesses a candidate’s ability to accurately perceive, understand, and manage emotions. It features three engaging, interactive assessments which together take about 20 minutes to complete. The EQ score is based on the IQ method of reporting scores, i.e., 100 is average, with a standard deviation of 15.

 Conclusion: You should definitely test for emotional intelligence during recruitment because employees with high emotional intelligence are more likely to stay calm under pressure, resolve conflict effectively, and respond to co-workers with empathy. Conversely, lacking critical emotional skills can lead to workplace conflict, such as misunderstandings due to an inability to recognize or understand emotions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Christopher Apps is an Organisational Psychologist and owner of Fermion. I enjoy keeping up to date with the latest research in psychology and sharing that information. There are a lot of fads, gimmicks and clichés in the people & culture field, and I believe it is important to be sceptical of hyperbolic claims about human behaviour and to adopt an evidence-based approach to work.

The focus of Fermion is "Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and “Recruitment to Retention: How to select good staff and keep them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please feel free to contact us at Fermion.

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Eleanor Roosevelt.