Hiring the right salespeople can make or break a company. While technical skills and experience are essential, a salesperson’s soft skills are often the determining factor in their success. Soft skills are the interpersonal skills that allow someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people. Salespeople with strong soft skills can build rapport with customers, earn their trust, and close deals effectively, qualities that are critical in today’s competitive sales jobs market.
Evaluating a salesperson’s soft skills can be challenging during an interview, but it’s not impossible. Here are some tips to help you evaluate a candidate’s soft skills effectively, along with what the data says about why this matters so much right now.
Key Takeaways
- Soft skills gaps are now considered more damaging than technical gaps by many recruiters, a real shift from how hiring priorities used to be weighted.
- A poor cultural or interpersonal fit has a measurable cost, showing up in both team productivity and turnover.
- Emotional intelligence can be assessed indirectly through open-ended questions, tone, listening behavior, and role-play, without needing a formal test.
- Role-play and reference checks are the two most reliable ways to see soft skills in action rather than just hear about them.
- These skills matter more, not less, as automation grows. The parts of sales that AI can’t replace are exactly the human, relationship-driven ones.
Why Soft Skills Evaluation Matters More Than Ever
It’s tempting to treat soft skills as a nice bonus on top of a strong resume. The data suggests they deserve a much bigger role in the evaluation itself. LinkedIn research has found that 89% of bad hires typically lack critical soft skills, regardless of how strong their technical proficiency looks on paper, which is a strong signal that resume-based screening alone misses the factor most likely to predict a failed hire. There’s also a real cost attached to getting this wrong. SHRM research puts the cost of a bad hire between 50% and 150% of the employee’s annual salary, and separately, McKinsey research suggests a poor cultural fit specifically can reduce team productivity by up to 30%. For a role built almost entirely on interpersonal trust and rapport, like sales, that risk is amplified well beyond what it would be in a more technical, less relationship-dependent position. Emotional intelligence specifically has moved from a nice-to-have to a genuine screening priority. Various recent hiring surveys report that a strong majority of hiring managers now weigh emotional intelligence heavily when evaluating candidates, often citing it as more predictive of on-the-job success than raw technical ability alone, particularly in customer-facing roles like sales. A quick note on sourcing: you’ll often see a claim online that “85% of job success comes from soft skills,” attributed to Harvard, Carnegie, and Stanford. This figure circulates widely but doesn’t trace back to any verifiable original study, so we’ve deliberately left it out here in favor of the more specifically sourced figures above.Ask Open-Ended Questions
Start the interview with open-ended questions that require the candidate to explain their experiences and give real examples of their soft skills. Questions like “Tell me about a time you had to resolve a conflict with a customer” or “Can you describe a time you had to persuade a customer to buy your product?” help you gauge communication, problem-solving, and persuasion skills directly, rather than taking a self-assessment on faith.Observe Body Language
Pay attention to the candidate’s body language during the interview. Are they making eye contact? Are they sitting up straight and genuinely engaged in the conversation? These can be meaningful indicators of confidence and assertiveness, though it’s worth remembering that nervousness alone shouldn’t be treated as disqualifying on its own.Listen to Their Tone and Language
A candidate’s tone and language can also give you real clues about their soft skills. Are they speaking clearly and confidently? Are they using persuasive language naturally, without sounding scripted? Are they adapting their language and tone to match yours as the conversation shifts? That kind of real-time adaptability is a strong proxy for how they’ll adjust to different customers.Evaluate Their Listening Skills
Salespeople need to be good listeners to understand their customers’ needs and build genuine rapport. During the interview, ask the candidate to explain their understanding of your company’s products and services. Observe how closely they listen to your questions and how thoughtfully they respond to feedback, since this mirrors exactly what they’ll need to do with a prospect.Use Role-Play Scenarios
Role-playing scenarios can be one of the most effective ways to evaluate a candidate’s soft skills directly. Create a scenario that simulates a sales call or customer interaction and ask the candidate to play the role of the salesperson. This lets you assess communication, problem-solving, and persuasion skills as they actually show up in practice, not just as they’re described after the fact.Check References
Finally, don’t skip reference checks. Ask a candidate’s previous employers or clients about their soft skills specifically, such as their ability to build rapport, communicate clearly, and solve problems under pressure. References often reveal patterns that don’t come through in a single interview, however well it goes.Quick Reference: Soft Skill to Evaluation Method
| Soft Skill | Best Way to Evaluate It |
| Communication | Open-ended questions, tone and clarity of answers |
| Persuasion | Role-play, examples of past objection handling |
| Listening | How they respond to your questions and feedback in real time |
| Confidence and assertiveness | Body language and delivery during the conversation |
| Adaptability | How they adjust tone and approach mid-conversation |
| Rapport-building | Reference checks with past clients or colleagues |
| Resilience | How they describe handling past rejection or setbacks |
Frequently Asked Questions
Can soft skills really be evaluated reliably in a single interview?
Not perfectly, but a combination of methods, open-ended questions, role-play, body language, and reference checks, gives a far more reliable read than any single technique alone. Treat each method as one data point rather than a complete verdict.
Is it fair to judge a candidate's soft skills based on nervousness during an interview?
Not entirely. Nervousness is common and doesn’t necessarily reflect how someone performs once comfortable in a role. Look for patterns across the whole conversation rather than weighing a single moment of nerves too heavily.
How do role-play scenarios help specifically with soft skills evaluation?
They shift the evaluation from a candidate describing their skills to actually demonstrating them in something close to a real scenario, which tends to reveal communication style, composure, and persuasion ability more accurately than a standard question-and-answer format.
Should soft skills or technical sales skills be weighted more heavily in hiring?
Both matter, but a growing body of hiring research suggests soft skills gaps are now viewed as more damaging than technical ones, particularly since technical processes can often be trained on the job, while interpersonal skills are harder to teach quickly.
What's the most overlooked soft skill in sales hiring?
Listening. It’s easy to focus on a candidate’s ability to talk persuasively and overlook how well they actually listen, even though understanding a customer’s real needs depends almost entirely on that skill.
The Bottom Line
Evaluating a salesperson’s soft skills during an interview requires a combination of techniques. Asking open-ended questions, observing body language, listening to tone and language, evaluating listening skills, using role-play scenarios, and checking references together give you a much clearer, more reliable picture than any single method alone. Given how costly a poor culture or interpersonal fit can be, hiring salespeople with genuinely strong soft skills isn’t just a nice bonus. It’s often the deciding factor in whether a hire succeeds at all.
Bryan Payne
Bryan Payne is the Founding Partner and Chief Talent Scout of Just Sales Jobs, a Toronto-based recruitment firm specializing exclusively in sales talent placement across North America. Over 25 years, he has placed hundreds of sales professionals at companies ranging from high-growth startups to Fortune 500s, and interviewed thousands of candidates along the way. Bryan writes on sales compensation, negotiation, and career strategy to help sales professionals make confident, informed decisions at every stage of their career. Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn or send him a message.