How to Assess Leadership Skills When Hiring

Leadership is an important attribute when it comes to hiring. Although most hiring managers will often look at skills related to the role itself, other skills such as teamwork, leadership, and communication shouldn’t be overlooked. A lot of people might consider leadership skills unimportant unless hiring for a management position, but in reality, they’re applicable in just about every role.

Skills such as leadership are often more important, as skills directly related to the job can be taught much more easily through training. It’s difficult to train an effective leader if they don’t already have some skills in this area, which is why hiring managers should try to focus on it when assessing new candidates.

A candidate with quality leadership will be more likely to succeed with the company long-term, helping the business achieve its aims. You don’t just need someone who can fill out papers and spreadsheets. Instead, you need someone with actual leadership potential to carry out your company’s overall goal and propel the brand forward.

In this article, we’ll be looking at what leadership skills are and how they’re used. In addition, you’ll be able to learn about the best ways to identify and assess leadership skills in a candidate, improving the selection and hiring process and leading to better results.

What Are Leadership Skills?

Leadership abilities are those that are utilized to organize others in order to achieve a common goal. Leadership abilities enable a person to drive people to perform a sequence of tasks, generally on a schedule, whether they are in a managerial role or heading a project. Leadership is a collection of multiple diverse skills functioning together rather than a single skill.

The best leaders are patient, empathetic, and capable of effective communication and feedback. In addition, they should be assertive and confident while still being able to listen to the ideas of their team. There are many different styles of leadership, but the most effective approach in the majority of cases involves being positive and taking the time to understand the needs and wants of each member of the team.

At their best, leaders can get more out of their team, encouraging and motivating them while helping them move in the right direction. It’s this aspect that makes leadership skills so valuable because they’re difficult to teach, yet they can make a huge difference to the success of a business. Good leaders also have excellent problem-solving skills and are capable of finding the best way to solve a problem before executing the solution successfully.

How to Identify the Right Leaders for Your Team

When hiring for an open position, leadership skills should be one of the main attributes that you look for once you’ve assessed whether the candidate will be a good fit for the role. Even for non-management positions, leaderships skills are incredibly important, especially if the employee stays on at the company over a long period of time. As they develop in their role, they’ll be able to make better use of their leadership skills to help drive the business forward and achieve the goals of the company.

Leadership skills are clearly important, but identifying and assessing them can be difficult in a standard interview. Care also needs to be taken to hire the right kind of leader for the right role, as even a great leader in the wrong job can still be a bad hire. The best way to accurately assess the leadership skills of a candidate is by asking them to complete a pre-employment screening test. These tests can look at specific qualities in a candidate and link their leadership abilities to the responsibilities of their role. A good test will be relatively quick and easy for the candidate to complete while still providing great insight into their skills and abilities.

Not only should a test aim to identify whether a candidate has leadership qualities, but it should also look at what kind of leader they are. You need to find the right leader for your team if you want to have the best success, so this is an important detail to consider. There are three main types of leadership assessments:

The DISC Test

The DISC test is based on a behavioral evaluation paradigm created by psychologist William Marston. It divides human emotional expression into four behavior types, Dominance, Influence, Stability, and Conscientiousness. The test allows candidates to be placed on a quadrant based on their behavior, revealing whether they are more focused on tasks or on people.

This exam can help you get a better understanding of each of your candidates and develop efficient strategies for your team to interact and communicate. The DISC test looks at people from two perspectives, exterior, and interior. The external perspective measures how well individuals interact with others and their surroundings. On the other hand, the internal perspective measures how well they process their thoughts.

The Enneagram Test

The Enneagram test is based on the personality model developed by psychiatrists. The model depicts nine distinct personalities on a nine-pointed diagram, with each personality’s main values and worldview described. It evaluates their leadership styles, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

Several Fortune 500 companies use the Enneagram exam to better understand their people and team structure. The reformer, the helpful, the investigator, and the challenger are examples of leadership types. Each type has its own set of advantages, and some are more suited to certain roles than others.

The 16 Types test

Similar to the popular personality test, Myers-Briggs, this test takes a comprehensive look at the candidate, including how they process information, how they make decisions, and what kind of person they are. It assesses the candidate based on four areas, Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, and Judgement.

At the end of the test, the candidate can be placed in one of sixteen different personality types depending on how they performed. The personality types reveal a lot about a person, including what kind of leader they are and how they respond to certain situations.