The Long-Term ROI of Hiring Candidates with Emotional Intelligence

One of the most common misconceptions about measuring EI is that it’s like taking a personality test. In fact, emotional intelligence is more about how individuals use and manage their emotions, and unlike a personality test, individuals can enhance emotional skills, whereas they are not likely to change their personality. 

By hiring with emotional intelligence in mind you can accurately assess not just whether a candidate would be a good fit for the specific role you’re looking to fill, but also if their values are aligned with your organization’s values, which will play a pivotal role in how quickly they’ll feel at home in their new position.

After all, as many of us who have hired inappropriate candidates can attest, a new employee who is placed in a role where they are unqualified, or required to use skills that don’t feel natural, will quickly drain of motivation, productivity, and energy.

This is what makes measuring a candidate’s EI so vital when it comes to the hiring process, and why emotional intelligence plays an increasingly larger role in long-term employee productivity and success.

Unlocking Employee Patterns for Long-Term ROI

By measuring emotional intelligence in each new hire and by ensuring that they are aligned with the right role for their skill set, motivations, and goals, you can begin to identify hiring strategies that lead to success.

This transformative step not only helps your employees thrive in their new role, but it can also help identify HR blind spots that might be preventing the new team member from achieving their maximum potential

This not only assists with individual success, but also can help with developing better functioning internal teams, assigning tasks, project leads, and other human resource issues that often hinder companies in achieving business goals.

How Emotional Intelligence Generates Real ROI

Some of the benefits of using EI to hire the right team members and ensure that they are aligned with the right roles within your organization are many, including:

• Lower costs associated with employee turnover.
• A reduction in time wasted managing low-energy, demotivated employees
• Motivated and happy employees who use their time more effectively and work harder.
• The Biggest Gain: A Happy, Motivated Workforce

Whether we’re HR experts, C-Suite leaders, or recruiters looking to help our clients get the most out of a prospective candidate, our goal when hiring a new team member is to ensure that they are as productive and happy as possible in their new role.

What are the elements of emotional intelligence in the workplace?

Several foundational components of emotional intelligence are essential to understand for better performance in the workplace:

• Social skills: Social skills are necessary to guide people effectively in a specific direction and influence them in any particular way. Social influence is critical to the relationship-building that is necessary for these aims.
• Self-awareness: With self-awareness, you want to know your strengths, weaknesses, values and the impressions you have upon others, which are, in essence, an essential part of good intuition. When you have self-awareness, you may appear confident and receptive to constructive criticism.
• Empathy: Empathy implies having an insight into the emotional state of others. With emotional intelligence, an understanding of emotions is critical when making decisions. Empathy has specific applications in business. These include sensitivity to cross-cultural differences, retaining top talent and hiring outstanding employees and the ability to help people develop professionally.
• Self-management: When you can put self-management into practice, you display an ability to redirect disruptive moods and impulses. Self-regulation means not allowing emotions to get the best of you. With emotional intelligence, you can reframe your feelings with positivity and align them with your passions. For example, in business, when things don’t turn out as you would like or your team makes a mistake, the urge might be to scold the team because of the failure. However, with EQ, you can see the error from an objective stance and look at all the causes. Then, you can make sure your team understands the consequences and consider alternative resolutions with them.
• Motivation: With motivation, there is a sense of accomplishment, and reaching goals is enjoyed for the sake of the achievement alone. A motivated, emotionally-intelligent individual works with passion and portrays an optimistic perspective to management. There is intrinsic energy to continue improving oneself and the business.

High EQ in the Workplace

• Making better decisions and solving problems
• Keeping cool under pressure
• Resolving conflicts
• Having greater empathy
• Listening, reflecting, and responding to constructive criticism

Low EQ in the Workplace

• Playing the role of the victim or not taking personal responsibility for errors
• Having passive or aggressive communication styles
• Refusing to work as a team  
• Being overly critical of others or not open to others' opinions

Bringing It All Together

Emotional intelligence is just one piece in the hiring puzzle, but it’s an important one. When you use it to nail the right hire, you minimize the risk of absorbing toxicity, poor performance, and turnover. Moreover, bringing in high-EQ individuals elevates the performance of existing employees and helps build the culture that you want for your company