As employers continue to refine how they evaluate frontline talent, new research from HiringBranch indicates that scoring soft skills in isolation may undermine the accuracy of hiring predictions. The findings, discussed in the latest episode of the podcast 'You Should Know,' challenge a common practice in pre-hire evaluation: reporting empathy, acknowledgment, active listening, and reassurance as separate scores.
The episode, titled 'Assessing Skills One at a Time Is Costing You Better Hires,' was published on August 26, 2026, and hosted by William Tincup. It features Assaf Bar-Moshe, Chief of Research and Development Officer at HiringBranch, a Montreal-based assessment company. The conversation comes as employers reconsider how they measure candidates for roles that involve live customer interactions, such as customer service representatives, sales agents, and retail associates.
Bar-Moshe explained that HiringBranch uses open-ended, voice-and-writing assessments designed to simulate real conversations. The study found that single-skill scoring shows only moderate correlation with human annotators, while a combined proprietary model demonstrates much stronger correlations. The four pillars of customer service that HiringBranch measures are acknowledgment, reassurance through positive language, empathy, and active listening.
The research underscores the importance of a holistic approach. Bar-Moshe illustrated this with a customer-facing scenario: '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.' This perspective is grounded in a linguistic rather than personality-based approach, which Bar-Moshe describes as a 'sociopragmatic analysis of the words that the candidate is actually saying.'
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. These predictions are then validated 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 influencing scoring weights for the same role.
Tincup shared a retail confrontation over mispriced broccoli that turned on diplomacy rather than policy, highlighting the practical implications of these findings. The episode also previewed 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. This research arrives at a time when many organizations are rethinking their hiring practices, and the implications could be significant for improving the accuracy of frontline hiring decisions.
