HiringBranch, a Montreal-based assessment company, has released new research challenging a common practice in pre-hire evaluation: reporting soft skills such as empathy, acknowledgment, active listening, and reassurance as isolated scores. The findings, discussed in the latest episode of the "You Should Know" podcast, suggest that this approach yields only moderate correlation with human annotators, while a combined proprietary model offers much stronger predictive power.
Assaf Bar-Moshe, Chief of Research and Development Officer at HiringBranch, explained the research during the episode, which aired on August 26, 2026, and was hosted by William Tincup. The conversation comes as employers increasingly seek to measure frontline talent—from customer service reps to sales agents to retail associates—against the realities of live customer interactions. Bar-Moshe, a trained linguist, described the company's voice-and-writing assessment design, which uses open-ended scenarios to evaluate candidates' responses.
The study focuses on four pillars of customer service: acknowledgment, reassurance through positive language, empathy, and active listening. Bar-Moshe emphasized that these skills are not independent; they interact in complex ways during real conversations. "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," he said.
HiringBranch takes a linguistic approach rather than a personality-based one, using what Bar-Moshe calls "sociopragmatic analysis of the words that the candidate is actually saying." The company's team of IO psychologists and linguists has built machine learning models trained on years of textual data to predict these skills, then validates them against on-the-job performance months after hire. Calibrations differ by client, industry, and geography, with regional variation across markets like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal shaping different scoring weights for the same role.
The podcast episode, co-hosted by Ryan Leary and William Tincup, also delved into how job descriptions are translated into conversation flows and scenario-based assessments. Tincup recounted a retail confrontation over mispriced broccoli that turned on diplomacy rather than policy, illustrating the nuanced nature of customer interactions. Bar-Moshe used this example to underscore the importance of measuring skills in context.
The research has significant implications for hiring practices. By scoring soft skills separately, employers may miss the holistic picture of a candidate's ability to handle complex customer situations. HiringBranch's combined model, which integrates multiple skills, provides more accurate predictions of on-the-job success. The company is also developing a self-serve capability 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 be available under the AI research tab on the HiringBranch website. The episode is available now on the You Should Know Podcast page and wherever podcasts are heard.
