More than a Resume: Why Orgs Must Prioritize Emotional Intelligence (EQ) to Retain Talent
Many organizations have strong commitments to building diverse and dynamic workplaces, but fail in the execution when it comes to recruitment. Organizations must fundamentally rethink their approach to talent acquisition, and prioritize candidates who exhibit more than just years on a resume.
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The ‘Best Candidate’ Does Not Exist
How do corporations currently recruit new candidates? From my experience, recruitment has been about one simple mantra: “Finding the best candidate!” It’s really as simple as that. Thanks for reading! … Just kidding. The concept of a “best candidate” is nothing more than a myth. Often times, you’ll find yourself in a situation where you have several ‘best candidates’ and no way of differentiating between them! In a world before the internet, the best differentiator has been the notorious ‘merit-based qualification.’
That is: years of formal education; number of years of experience; and academic name recognition. After all, how else could you tell if a candidate was worth the time and money, unless some organization was vouching for them?
It’s for this reason that, to me, merit-based qualifications have become a shadow of what they once were. Organizations now use this as a cop-out; a way of saying ‘We lean into outmoded methods of differentiation.’ Merit-based qualifications like years of experience and academic name recognition are short-hand methods of differentiating between candidates before actually getting to know them and their ways of working.
There are SO many candidates out there, today, who are completely self-taught entrepreneurs, coders, and designers with little-to-no formal education in… anything! It’s these self-motivated, self-started, and self-taught movers-and-shakers who are falling through the cracks every single day at organizations that don’t see them beyond letters on a page. But the game has changed. With the democratization of information via the internet, not only are candidates springing up from around the world, but they are learning more, faster, than many organizations can keep up with -- and that’s why they lose out on amazing talent, to competitors, and maybe even to entirely different industries.
Modernized Hiring Isn’t Just for Tech Companies & Startups
I do want to acknowledge that some organizations are on the cutting edge of elevated recruitment efforts; already making strides to modernize their hiring practices. However, many of these organizations are those you would already expect to do so -- Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google; these are organizations that are already incredibly well-known for their diversity and unorthodox hiring methods. It’s all the other players -- your banks, fashion companies, beauty brands, food companies, that are in dire need of a new playbook. It’s these organizations that are hemorrhaging in talent retention for current employees, and losing new ones to entirely different industries.
Place Your Bets on Emotional Intelligence (EQ)
A major driver of this trend, especially at older, more traditional organizations like banks and food brands, is a lack of emphasis on emotional intelligence when hiring. You wouldn’t believe how many employees across Corporate America still subscribe to the age-old mantra of “I’m just here to work. Not here to make friends.” While we can all appreciate a straightforward, and no-nonsense business partner, who gets shit done, it’s exactly these kinds of attitudes that recruiters need to select out.
Making Friends at Work is Critical
Now, this isn’t to say you’ve to be buddy-buddy with everyone in order to succeed in a diversifying and dynamic office, and it certainly doesn’t mean you need to be an extrovert! I only use the example of employees who are ‘Not here to make friends,’ to illustrate the rationale and emotional unintelligence associated with this kind of a perspective. Consider a 2018 article published by Gallup, the renowned business advisory company, which stated that their research has shown:
"[There is] is a concrete link between having a best friend at work and the amount of effort employees expend in their job."
- Gallup research, 2018
Gallup further elaborated that if organizations developed cultures in which 6 out of 10 employees can agree that they have a best friend at work, then these organizations could realize as much as 7% more engaged customers, and 12% higher profit. These are significant business returns that are generated by doing something as simple as hiring someone you think your team will like, versus hiring someone who only “looks better on paper,” and maybe doesn’t give off the same positive energy.
Emotional Intelligence is Key to Retention
Selecting out candidates who don’t exhibit the level of emotional intelligence to mesh well into your team is an effective method of mitigating retention problems further down the line. Consider a three-year study published by Leadership IQ, a global leadership training and research company led by Mark Murphy, in 2015. After studying over 5,000 hiring managers from hundreds of public and private organizations, they were able to generate statistics on over 20,000 hires that these managers employed.
The study found that “26% of new hires fail because they can’t accept feedback, 23% because they’re unable to understand and manage emotions, 17% because they lack the necessary motivation to excel, 15% because they have the wrong temperament for the job, and only 11% because they lack the necessary technical skills.”
Aside from those hires lacking technical ability, the remaining 89% captured in this study all failed in some way related to EQ and the ability to navigate interpersonal relationships. This is something that can’t be summarized and put on a resume, and is only navigable by meeting and shaking hands with a potential candidate yourself.
How to Recruit for Emotional Intelligence
With all this said, if you’re a hiring manager, your next questions might be: How do I recruit for emotional intelligence? How do I test for it? While there are several empirical personality tests and questionnaires out there designed by renowned psychologists and research firms, and recruitment agencies offering services to phase candidates out for you -- the best way to test for a fit on your team is to see how much you like the candidate. This is like taking a page out of the playbook for all of those traditionalist organizations.
These organizations who overly fixate on strict qualifications like years fo experience are the same organizations who fail to gather ANY sort of experience with their candidates over dinner, or on a test-project, or in focus groups. Your best shot at understanding how well your candidate will mesh into the team, and truly be a team-player and not someone who is ‘Just here to work,’ is to experience first-hand what they’re like in a variety of situations. This is so that you don’t hire someone who, in less than 18 months, will exit the organization due to a lack of culture fit or an inability to accept feedback.
When I was hired by my current organization, which is a larger and more traditional company, I was screened via a set of hard interviews but also a by set experiential “soft interviews.” These were dinners, and conversations down the hall, and handshakes in the hotel lobby. All of them, bite-sized opportunities for me to make an impression on hiring managers from several different teams, as well as bite-sized opportunities for those managers to understand who I am, what I’m like, and whether I’d be a good person to bring onto their teams. I would argue that these interactions were just as important, if not more, than the formal hard interviews. These interactions allowed managers to gauge first-hand my EQ through how I navigate a room full of strangers and how I make dinner conversation with candidates I am competing with.
Think Beyond the Resume
Granted, this is the process for a sales-oriented kind of an organization, but the takeaway is the same: demanding experienced candidates demands that hiring managers experience these candidates and never rely solely on their resume credentials, because some things simply don’t show up on paper! Bring candidates in, shake their hands, ask them about their interests. These micro-interviews go a long way to not only finding someone your team will love, but also a long way in building substantial and sustainable business success.