Effective hiring and staff management aim to maximize the return from your company's human-capital investment and minimize the related financial risks.  But obviously, you can’t hope to achieve these goals without at least a basic ability to assess the potential of people.  In fact, people assessment is as essential a prerequisite for conducting performance reviews, promotions, and succession planning with your existing staff as it is for establishing benchmarks for new hires.

In practice, however, determining the extent of people’s technical (or “hard”) skills and how they relate to the specific position you’re trying to fill is hard enough.  But then you have to go still further to analyze their personal and interpersonal competencies (or “soft” skills) as well—skills that are often just as critical to the successful execution of their responsibilities and your business strategy as their mechanical skills but decidedly harder to analyze and quantify. 

The problem in based on the fact that, unlike “hard” skills, “soft” skills lie in the more touchy-feely zone of human relations, emotions, and personalities and are thus harder to define.  For example, in most hiring scenarios you need to estimate how well you can expect candidates to mesh with your corporate culture, your existing personnel, and the requisite external contacts of their prospective position.  In fact, all your staff whose roles relate to people require a higher-than-average ability to maintain successful working relationships, communicate information effectively, interpret and respond appropriately to other people’s feelings, and resolve conflicts.  In fact, together with your staff’s hard skills, these types of soft skills help drive the success of your organization.  Hiring the right employees to meet these requirements not only achieves higher levels of productivity and customer satisfaction for your organization, but it also provides employees with economic, psychological, and social rewards in return.  In other words, it constitutes a value proposition all around.