Page 14 - Graduate Recruitment Handbook 2025

Emotional intelligence is a vital component of other underperforming, what would you do?
key skills, including: • How would you persuade someone to do
• Interpersonal and communication skills something that they didn’t want to do?
• Teamwork and relationship-building • How would you handle conflict?
• Influencing skills • How would you handle a stressful work
• Leadership situation?
• Customer service or client management skills.
Your emotional intelligence could improve your own How can you improve your
work performance as well. For instance, if you are emotional intelligence?
feeling stressed, you could take steps to relieve the A good starting point is to interact with different
cause or (depending on your job) rearrange your people from a range of backgrounds. As we’ve
day to leave more complicated or arduous tasks discussed, people with higher emotional intelligence
to a better time. This in turn could improve your can see things from other people’s points of view,
productivity. As such, emotional intelligence allows even if they themselves don’t agree with them, and
you to strengthen your inner resilience.
the best way to begin to do this is to meet other
people and get to know how they think. Part-time
Do employers assess your jobs, getting involved with different societies and
emotional intelligence during the extracurricular activities, volunteering (here in the UK
graduate recruitment process? or abroad), travelling – can all widen your horizons.
Emotional intelligence may be one of the Find out about planning a gap year and international
competencies assessed during a strengths- internships
based recruitment process or during an online
situational judgement test – a type of online ability/ Another exercise would be to read news and opinion
psychometric test that, these days, often forms part pieces from a wide range of sources, particularly
of your initial application.
those that you don’t agree with, and consider the
different perspectives taken on topics and why that
However, it is likely that recruiters won’t be judging might be. The aim here isn’t necessarily for you to
how emotionally intelligent you are per say. They will change your views but to understand why people
probably be explicitly assessing your communication, might think differently.
teamwork, and relationship-building skills – all of
which are enhanced by higher degrees of emotional The other aspect of emotional intelligence is getting
intelligence.
to know yourself and how you think. Perhaps most
importantly, learn to recognise your triggers for
This being the case, your emotional intelligence will stress or for any negative behaviours and develop
necessarily be on display at an assessment centre – strategies for avoiding them. Identify, too, your
particularly during group exercises and during any strengths and what combination of circumstances
times for small talk. You should also call upon it when leads you to be at your best. This level of self-
answering any competency-based or job-specific awareness will be very attractive to employers
interview questions that involve people, feelings and and prepare you to achieve your ambitions in the
behaviour. These include:
workplace.
• Tell us about a time when you’ve worked with a
difficult person. Sourced from https://targetjobs.co.uk/careers-
• If you noticed a team member was advice/skills-for-getting-a-job/emotional-
intelligence-secret-ingredient-career-success

14 2025/26 Graduate Recruitment Handbook