Throughout our lives, we continually hear tips for successful interviews. These tips include: Shake the person’s hand firmly. Make eye contact. Don’t fidget. Smile. Make sure you ask questions at the end of the interview. The list goes on.
All of these practices are social skills. It has been ingrained in both hiring managers and candidates that good candidates for all roles must have strong social skills. But, is this true? Should all roles require the incumbent to have strong social skills?
Absolutely not.
While it is necessary for people on your team who communicate regularly with external parties, such as vendors or customers, to know how to handle a range of social situations, it may not be necessary for your analysts, accountants, developers, engineers, technicians, researchers, designers, cooks, dishwashers, drivers, logistics staff, and IT staff, among various other roles, to have strong social skills. Since these roles are focused on completing specific tasks well instead of communicating information to other people, why should a hiring manager care about the person’s social aptitude?
By only considering individuals with strong social skills for roles that do not require these skills, hiring managers will overlook and dismiss many excellent and highly-qualified individuals for their openings. Here’s an example: You’re a hiring manager with an opening for a data analyst on your team. The candidate’s resume is incredible. She has two degrees in the area of expertise and is strong in both programming languages and data visualization. In the interview, her technical skills are very apparent in the examples that she gives. However, she does not seem confident in the interview, does not consistently look you in the eyes throughout the interview, and only asks one question at the end of the interview. Would you hire this person for the data analyst job?
If the person has the skills needed to complete the tasks on a day to day basis consistently at a high quality, yes, you should hire the person.
In the example above, strong verbal communication was not a skill that was required for the data analyst role. However, if this hiring manager dismissed this candidate because she did not exemplify strong social skills in the interview, this hiring manager would potentially miss out on an excellent candidate.
This oversight of candidates who do not have typical social skills, such as individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder, happens regularly in the hiring process. At the same time, we are currently experiencing one of the most competitive talent markets we have ever seen, and companies can make some of their best hires by considering candidates who do not have strong social skills. The following are tips to ensure that your company does not overlook qualified candidates in the hiring process:
Determine the list of skills necessary to successfully complete the tasks of the job, and ensure that the list does not include anything that should not be required
Include diverse team members in the hiring process
Train hiring managers and other interviewers on how to evaluate candidates in an interview based only on the requirements, and not on their social skills if not required
Ask each interviewer to use a quantitative scale to evaluate each candidate on each one of the required skills
Discuss results immediately following the interview to ensure that no biases or afterthoughts become part of the evaluation process
Many companies that are focusing on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion are updating their hiring practices to make sure that qualified diverse candidates, including Autistic candidates and other neurodiverse candidates, are not overlooked in the hiring process.
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