HiringBranch Study: Scoring Soft Skills Separately Weakens Frontline Hiring Predictions

The latest episode of You Should Know, titled Assessing Skills One at a Time Is Costing You Better Hires, published August 26, 2026 and hosted by William Tincup, features Assaf Bar-Moshe, Chief of Research and Development Officer at HiringBranch. The Montreal-based assessment company has released new research challenging a common practice in pre-hire evaluation: reporting empathy, acknowledgment, active listening, and reassurance as isolated scores. The conversation lands as employers rethink how frontline talent, from customer service reps to sales agents to retail associates, is measured against the realities of live customer interactions.

Bar-Moshe walks listeners through HiringBranch's open-ended, voice-and-writing assessment design and the study behind the headline. Key threads include:

• Why single-skill scoring produces only moderate correlation with human annotators, while a combined proprietary model produces much stronger correlations.
• The four pillars of customer service HiringBranch measures: acknowledgment, reassurance through positive language, empathy, and active listening.
• How job descriptions are translated into conversation flows and scenario-based assessments calibrated per client, region, and role.

The discussion is grounded in specific customer-facing moments. Tincup recounts a retail confrontation over mispriced broccoli that turned on diplomacy rather than policy, while Bar-Moshe frames the research finding in plain language.

He adds that HiringBranch takes a linguistic rather than personality-based approach, describing the method as a "sociopragmatic analysis of the words that the candidate is actually saying."

Bar-Moshe, a trained linguist, explains that HiringBranch's team of IO psychologists and linguists uses years of textual data to build machine learning models that predict empathy, acknowledgment, and related skills, then validates those predictions against on-the-job performance months after hire. Calibrations differ by client, industry, and even geography, with regional variation across markets like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal shaping different scoring weights for the same role. He also previews a self-serve capability in development that would let hiring managers build assessments from a library of conversation flows and skills, reducing reliance on weak or generic job descriptions. The full study will appear under the AI research tab on the HiringBranch website.

You Should Know, part of the WRKdefined Podcast Network based in Arlington, Texas, is co-hosted by Ryan Leary and William Tincup and reaches more than 3.9 million verified listeners each month. The show tackles pivotal leadership challenges, workforce dynamics, career mobility, and the impact of technology on hiring. This episode is available now wherever podcasts are heard, and at the You Should Know Podcast page.

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