EY is investing $100 million in bonuses to employees who showed judgment, adaptability, and critical thinking under pressure. Good for them. I mean that. It’s a real investment, and from what I’ve read, they’re also rethinking how they develop early-career talent, not just how they reward senior people. That’s worth applauding.
But I have a harder question sitting underneath the headline: how did EY know who already had those skills before they hired them, promoted them, or put them in the room where it mattered?
Because that’s the part nobody is talking about, and it’s the part that determines whether you’re rewarding good judgment or just getting lucky.
Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Soft Skills?
Soft skills are the thinking and people abilities AI can’t replicate: judgment, critical thinking, adaptability, and empathy. As AI absorbs routine work, these skills are what make some employees stand out, and employers like EY are now paying for them directly.
Soft skills are the topic I get asked to speak about more than anything else right now. Executives sit across from me and admit, sometimes reluctantly, that they’re struggling to demonstrate something as basic as empathy. That’s not a small problem. AI has no empathy. It can’t read a room, sit with someone’s frustration, or make the kind of call that requires understanding what a person truly needs instead of what they’re asking for. The human element is still the biggest thing standing between your brand and becoming a commodity. EY’s bonus program is proof that even a firm with every resource in the world is leaning on tools like employee behavioral assessments and leadership personality styles to figure out who actually has it.
EY’s program rewards business acumen, judgment, adaptability, and how well people experiment with new technology, with awards ranging from $500 spot bonuses up to $25,000 for work with real impact. They’ve also redesigned how they bring in early-career talent through what they’re calling a Career Residency Program, pairing real client work with coaching instead of throwing new hires into the deep end and hoping the good ones surface. I have real respect for that. Most companies aren’t rethinking development at that level.
Omnia has measured soft skills like these for more than 40 years, long before “human skills” became a phrase companies put $100 million behind. The data backs up why this matters now more than ever. Korn Ferry found that 73% of talent leaders rank critical thinking as the most important skill needed in 2026, ahead of AI and technical skills. ManpowerGroup puts it even more starkly: seven of the ten fastest-growing skills organizations need by 2030 are soft skills, and ethical judgment is one of the hardest capabilities to automate. Everyone agrees on what matters. Almost nobody has a reliable way to know who actually has it before the stakes get high.
What Happens When You Don't Know Someone's Judgment Until It's Too Late?
You find out the expensive way. Poor judgment rarely shows in an interview. It shows under pressure, after the hire, as turnover, team conflict, and performance issues nobody addressed.
I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count, and it never looks like a bad hire on paper. I once watched a leader get hired who had a huge amount of assertiveness and very little perspective, which is really just another word for judgment. She looked decisive in interviews. Decisive people often do. But when real stress hit, she overreacted instead of stepping back, and she lost employees over it. Nobody saw that coming because nobody was looking for it. They were looking for confidence, and they got it. What they needed was judgment, and there’s a real difference between the two.
Another one sticks with me. A company hired an executive who had an intense need to be liked, more than to be respected, and our data flagged exactly that risk before the hire went through. They hired her anyway. She couldn’t make the difficult calls that leadership actually requires. Instead of dealing with real performance issues directly, she formed factions. People took sides. The team fractured, not because she was a bad person, but because the one skill the role required most, the willingness to make an unpopular decision and stand behind it, was the one skill she didn’t have. That’s a team dynamics problem you can see coming if you know what you’re looking for, and that’s the real cost of a bad hire: lost employees, a fractured team, and months of cleanup.
Omnia’s own 2026 Talent Trends data shows the gap clearly. Assessment use has grown to 58.1% of organizations, up from 44.6% the year before, but only 39.7% of companies are benchmarking their actual top performers to define what good looks like in a specific role. Most companies are still hiring for skills and hoping judgment shows up later. Sometimes it does. Often, it costs you people, time, and trust before you find out it doesn’t.
How Do You Spot and Develop Soft Skills Like Judgment?
Assess soft skills before you hire or promote with a pre-employment assessment and job benchmarking, then develop them with coaching tailored to how each person is naturally wired.
This splits into two jobs, and most companies only do one of them.
The first job is knowing before you hire or promote. This is what job benchmarking and employee behavioral assessments are built for. You’re not looking for a generic personality type. You’re comparing a candidate’s behavioral patterns, like the balance between assertiveness and perspective, or the pull between being liked and being respected, against what your best performers in that specific role actually look like. That’s the difference between guessing and knowing.
The second job is developing judgment in people who are already in the seat, and that takes more than a training module. It’s really an employee development assessment problem as much as a coaching one. When I’m coaching someone on this, I start by asking questions and leaning into what I already know about how they’re wired.
If I have someone who is typically a big-picture, independent thinker with a lot of resilience, and I watch them get stuck in the weeds instead of thinking through how to solve something, I name it directly. I tell them exactly what I’m seeing and where the gap is, then I ask how they think they can solve it. If I’m coaching someone more cautious or reserved, the approach flips. I have to build their confidence first, and help them see they already have the expertise and experience to solve the problem in front of them, before I can push them toward a decision.
A soft skills checklist before you hire or promote for judgment
☐ Watch how someone handles ambiguity, not just how well they follow instructions.
☐ Pay attention to what they do under real pressure, not what they say they would do.
☐ Ask what they’d be willing to sacrifice for a tradeoff, not just what outcome they want.
☐ Benchmark candidates against your actual top performers in that role, not a generic profile.
☐ When coaching, name the specific behavior and the gap. “Communicate better” is not feedback anyone can act on.
What Is the Real Payoff of Getting This Right?
EY’s $100 million says something important: paying for human skills is a nice reward. But it’s a reward for something the company couldn’t see coming. Getting the right people in the right seats in the first place, that’s the real reward, and it belongs to the company and to the leaders who have to lead and develop the people underneath them. One is a bonus check written after the fact. The other is avoiding the version of my two stories above: the lost employees, the factions, the performance issues nobody addressed until they became a crisis. That makes behavioral assessment one of the most overlooked employee retention tools there is: knowing who you’re promoting before you promote them, which is the foundation of good succession planning.
You don’t need EY’s budget to hire for soft skills. A $100 million bonus pool rewards people after the fact. For a small or midsize business, a hiring assessment tells you who has those skills before you hire, promote, or build a team, at a fraction of the cost of a bad hire.
So here’s what I want you to do differently on Monday morning. Get curious about what actually motivates the people on your team, and what strengths they carry that you might be overlooking because you’re focused on what they produce instead of how they think. That single shift, from evaluating output to understanding the person behind it, is where every good talent decision starts.
If you want to know what that looks like in practice, that’s exactly what we do at Omnia. Reach out and let’s talk about what assessing for soft skills and judgment could look like for your team, before you’re the one writing a bonus check to fix a problem you could have seen coming.
