The goal of effective hiring is to maximize the return from your organization's human-capital investment and minimize the corresponding financial risks.  And as a hiring manager, your task is to assess the potential of job candidates accordingly--in an astute, consistent, legal, fair, and humane manner.  Of course, your first task is to determine how closely their technical (or “hard") skills relate to the technical requirements of the specific position you’re trying to fill.  But the purpose of this article is to go beyond this initial assessment to discuss the more subtle aspects of candidate assessment and how to go about them.

PrintLink believes that your company’s ROI on human capital is a direct outcome of the effectiveness with which your individual staff members utilize their skills both alone and collectively.  Therefore, it’s important to recognize that, since employees are not isolated “commodities” or "resources", but rather creative and social beings in a productive enterprise, their job-oriented interpersonal skills--also called “soft” skills--are arguably as critical to the success of your business as their mechanical abilities.

In fact, we are hearing more frequently from employers and employees alike that interpersonal adeptness represents a vast category of transferable skills that a worker can bring to the job. Moreover, technical ability alone is usually not enough to enable employees to achieve career success.  Studies indicate that many people who have difficulty in obtaining or holding down a job often possess the needed technical competence but lack interpersonal competence.