Why Assessing Skills One at a Time Is Costing You Better Hires

On the latest episode of You Should Know, host William Tincup sits down with Assaf Bar-Moshe, Chief of Research and Development Officer at HiringBranch, to challenge a common assumption in pre-hire assessments: that scoring individual skills like empathy, acknowledgment, active listening, and reassurance in isolation is effective. New research from the Montreal-based assessment company suggests otherwise.

Bar-Moshe explains that when these skills are measured separately, the correlation with human annotators is only moderate. However, a proprietary model that combines these skills yields much stronger correlations. "If a candidate can express empathy, but is unable to solve the issue correctly or to comprehend the issue correctly or to reassure the customer, then this empathy is nice, but it's actually useless," Bar-Moshe says.

The episode dives into HiringBranch's approach, which uses open-ended voice and writing assessments to measure four pillars of customer service: acknowledgment, reassurance through positive language, empathy, and active listening. The method is grounded in sociopragmatic analysis—a linguistic, not personality-based, examination of the words candidates use. Bar-Moshe, a trained linguist, details how his team of IO psychologists and linguists uses years of textual data to build machine learning models that predict these skills and validate them against on-the-job performance months after hire.

Calibrations are tailored to each client, industry, and even geography, with regional variations across markets like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal affecting scoring weights for the same role. The discussion brings these concepts to life with a retail scenario: Tincup recounts a confrontation over mispriced broccoli that hinged on diplomacy rather than policy, illustrating why isolated skill scores fall short.

Bar-Moshe also previews a self-serve capability in development that would allow hiring managers to build assessments from a library of conversation flows and skills, reducing reliance on weak or generic job descriptions. The full study will be available under the AI research tab on the HiringBranch website.

Tune in to hear the full conversation and rethink how you assess frontline talent.