The case for hiring for emotional intelligence

It's often said that technical skills get you in the door, but people skills get you promoted. That's true, but when you’re hiring at the leadership level, that saying stops being quite so useful. A new leader will need emotional intelligence (EI) skills immediately. In their first hard conversation, the first missed number by one of their team members, the first time a direct report pushes back on them in a meeting. When you hire a leader, you aren't hiring for technical skills and then hoping to train them up on people skills. You’re hiring for both.

This is why you want to hire for emotional intelligence, and train for it. This isn’t an argument against development. Emotional intelligence training works. Its success is measurable, and many organizations are certifying their own trainers to deliver EI training at scale. But training compounds, and ideally you’re training already emotionally intelligent leaders to be in the 1% of emotional intelligence, rather than trying to train someone weak in EI to become average.

What it's worth: the L'Oréal case example

L'Oréal began selecting sales agents on the basis of specific emotional competencies rather than its existing selection process. The agents hired for EI skills outsold those hired the old way. They outsold their peers by $91,370 per salesperson annually, for a net revenue increase of $2,558,360. They also had 63% less turnover in their first year. 

The inverse is just as instructive. In Leadership IQ's landmark study, 46% of newly hired employees failed within 18 months, and only 11% failed for lack of technical skill. Twenty-six percent couldn't accept feedback, 23% couldn't understand and manage emotions, 17% lacked motivation, and 15% had the wrong temperament. Many of the managers involved admitted the interpersonal red flags had been visible during their interviews, but had been overlooked in favor of expertise and technical skill.

What you're actually hiring for, and why it matters more now

Emotional intelligence is your ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and to use that awareness to manage your behavior and your relationships. It breaks into four core skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. 

Self-awareness is your ability to recognize and understand your emotions, and self-management is your ability to regulate those emotions. Social awareness is your ability to pick up on the emotions of others, and relationship management is your ability to use each of the other three EI skills to be effective in your interactions with others.

Drawing on more than 500,000 TalentSmart assessments, Travis Bradberry, the coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and author of The New Emotional Intelligence, found that emotional intelligence accounts for 58% of job performance across all types of roles, and that 90% of top performers score high in it. 

Those findings predate AI in the workplace. As AI absorbs the technical and analytical work, the differentiating skills are the ones AI can't perform, the enduring human skills. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 ranks resilience and flexibility as the second-most essential core skill employers need today, with leadership and social influence third and self-awareness fifth. In a 2026 survey of more than 600 employers by Drexel University's LeBow College of Business, hiring managers consistently ranked interpersonal skills and willingness to learn above AI and technical ability, on the reasoning that the technical piece is teachable and the rest isn't. 

How to actually hire for EI

Most organizations agree emotional intelligence matters, then run a hiring process that ignores it. Measuring pedigree and technical fit are the norm, which is exactly why they dominate interviews, often at the expense of EI.

Assessments are the wrong instrument here. Not because they're weak, but because the hiring context makes them less effective. A 360 is the most accurate measure of emotional intelligence, and you don't have access to a candidate's colleagues. Self-report assessments struggle to effectively measure emotional intelligence, as they’re relatively easy to see the best answers and “game” the assessment in order to get hired.

For selection, the behavioral interview does the work. Annie McKee's behavioral event interview method, published in the Harvard Business Review, comes down to three main steps:

1. Ask for a success story where the candidate is the protagonist — a situation with a real interpersonal challenge that ended well.
2. Ask for a failure, something that didn't work and that they learned from.
3. For both, run the same probe repeatedly: what did you think, what did you feel, and what did you actually do?

Here are six example questions to ask:

1. "Tell me about a time your mood affected your team's performance." 

2. "Describe a piece of critical feedback that landed hard." 

3. "Walk me through a time you were genuinely angry at work." 

4. "Tell me about a time you misread someone." 

5. "Tell me about a difficult conversation you put off." 

6. "Describe a mistake you made that affected other people." 

Across all six, listen carefully for specificity. People high in emotional intelligence should be good at identifying real examples, sharing what they were thinking, and importantly, what they did to either rectify the situation or change their future behavior. 

Hire for it, then build it

Hiring for emotional intelligence raises your floor. Build an emotionally intelligent leadership bench and then train leaders up to create a workplace culture of emotional intelligence. The organizations that see the biggest returns select for it at the door, then keep developing it deliberately, operating with a shared model and shared language.