As a Psychology graduate and self-proclaimed “people person”, Emotional Intelligence has always been a subject of genuine interest to me. As a specialist recruiter of experienced HR professionals this is also now a subject that relates strongly to my work life and something I touched on in my last blog. 

I find myself often asking the question of how affectively our Emotional Intelligence is deployed during a recruitment process? It has become popular and relevant from a selection perspective, lending itself to companies hiring individuals who they have judged to have the emotional intelligence and awareness to fit into the organisational culture and excel within the demands and remit of a specific role.  It’s value is recognised from that perspective.

But what about us as individual candidates within a recruitment process?  How well do we deploy it as a job seeker? When we are looking for our next career move, how emotionally engaged are we with that journey?  How “emotionally intelligent” are we throughout that process? We should be.  The recruitment process you are entertaining matters more to you than to anyone else.  You naturally want to get it right.

Internationally renowned Psychologist Daniel Goleman describes 5 domains of  emotional intelligence; the first three of which are particularly relevant to this:

  1. Knowing your emotions
  2. Managing your own emotions
  3. Motivating yourself

Changing a job or moving organisations is fundamentally an emotional decision, yet our decision making process is often focused on facts or headlines.  As a job seeker considering job opportunities, applying for positions, undertaking interview processes and considering job offers how well do we recognise our emotions and manage them? What is truly motivating us?

In a series of blogs I aim to explore these questions further, looking at principals of Emotional Intelligence and Journey Mapping to understand the candidate journey throughout a recruitment process from an emotional perspective and to gauge whether as individual candidates we are doing ourselves justice or potentially missing a trick. 

As part of an extensive HR and recruitment network, there must be some fantastic opinions out there on this. What are your thoughts?