Believe it or not, poor communication can cost companies up to $10,000 per employee, per year. Your employees will waste more time, make more mistakes, and be less productive if you don’t optimize your communication best practices, technologies, and quality of hire.
One way to improve your communication practices is to hire more candidates with strong communication skills, which you can do through a communication skill survey.
A communication skills survey is a questionnaire assessment that you offer to candidates as part of the pre-hire or screening process. Communication skills survey include questions designed to assess or evaluate the communication skills, experiences, and capabilities of your candidates.
Any role that requires working with other team members or using communication technologies will need candidates with solid communication skills. You can use communication skills surveys for several roles, including:
Communication involves a wide range of tasks, roles, and responsibilities, which can include several skills, experiences, and capabilities. Here’s a list of some of the most common skills to look out for in a communications role:
What communication skills you hire for will largely depend on what type of role you’re looking to fill. Below is a list of some of the most important communication skills you should be hiring for based on what kind of role you’re trying to fill.
Customer service representatives will be communicating and solving problems with customers, so they should have the following skill set in order to excel in their role:
Copywriters and marketing professionals need to be able to come up with convincing and creative ways to communicate with customers. Strong persuasive skills, writing skills, narrative skills, and analytical skills are a must for many of these roles. Here’s what you should hire for from a copywriter/marketing professional:
Communications specialists are jack-of-all-trades type roles within the greater umbrella that is communications. These individuals conduct research, manage email accounts, run social media accounts, handle public relations, and drive marketing efforts. Here are some skills you should be looking for in a communications specialist.
There are a few ways to assess a candidate’s communication skills. You can use the following survey formats when assessing a candidate’s communication skills.
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Questions |
Strongly agree |
Agree |
Neutral |
Disagree |
Strongly disagree |
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I get impatient when people don’t express themselves clearly |
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If someone asks me whether or not I understand, I will say even if I’m not entirely sure |
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I tend to summarize others’ thoughts before responding to them |
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I try to see things from others’ perspectives, even if I know they’re wrong |
Provide a number to each statement from 1-5: 1) never, 2) rarely, 3) sometimes, 4) often, 5) always
_____ I ask questions to solve problems with others.
_____ Eye contact and body language are just as important–if not more important–than what is being said in a conversation.
_____ I expect people from other cultures to adapt to corporate American communication styles.
_____ I try to keep myself updated with relevant communication technologies in my field.
_____ If people don’t understand something, I would rather tell them what to do than help them better understand the problem.
One way to ensure you get candidates who score highly on your skills survey is to improve your ability to hire better candidates. Crosschq helps improve the kind of candidates you hire with cutting-edge sourcing and screening technologies, 360 reference checks, and quality of hire analytics that will help you correlate candidate skills with new-hire performance.
Learn more about Crosschq’s proprietary technology and our radical “Q” (Quality of hire) Report insights today.