Validity of HiPeople’s BESSI Soft Skills Test

This report describes the validity evidence supporting HiPeople’s implementation of the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills Inventory (BESSI). Developed by Brent Roberts, Christopher Soto, and colleagues (2022), BESSI represents one of the most empirically grounded frameworks for measuring soft skills.

The benchmark sample used for HiPeople’s implementation of BESSI consisted of 244 full-time employed adults. Participants were, on average, 36.38 years old, with ages ranging from 20 to 64. The gender distribution was balanced, with 49% identifying as female and 51% identifying as male. The sample represented a wide range of national backgrounds, although the largest groups came from Italy and the United Kingdom. All participants were employed full-time, most commonly in Information Services, Data Processing, Software, and Healthcare Services. The age distribution reflected a typical working population, with a concentration of individuals in their late twenties to late thirties. The nationality distribution showed representation from more than thirty countries, which supports the generalizability of the benchmark across international contexts.

HiPeople administers a set of thirty-two soft skill modules derived from the BESSI framework. Each module contains six Likert-scale items, and scoring follows the official structure provided by the instrument’s authors. Items are organized into facets and domains representing behavioral, emotional, and social skills across five broad skill families. Responses are processed using the original question-to-facet mapping and the published scoring logic, including reverse coding where required. Because BESSI is designed to measure skills rather than stable personality traits, the results capture behavioral tendencies that can develop over time rather than fixed dispositions.

Participants completed the full set of BESSI items online as part of HiPeople’s benchmarking initiative. Data were cleaned, checked for completeness, and scored according to the original scoring rubric. Analyses were conducted in Python and R using the official scoring tables and metadata provided by Soto and Roberts. HiPeople does not alter BESSI item wording or scoring procedures, ensuring fidelity to the validated instrument. Domain-level and facet-level scores were computed to align with how BESSI is presented to organizational users.

The validity of the BESSI framework is supported by extensive evidence from the authors’ original research program. Across seven large-scale validation studies involving more than 6,300 participants, the BESSI consistently demonstrated a stable factor structure, strong psychometric properties, and clear conceptual differentiation between its behavioral, emotional, and social skill constructs. Criterion validity has been established through meaningful relationships with important life outcomes, including the association between self-management skills and academic achievement (GPA correlation = .23) and the relationship between social engagement skills and peer acceptance (r = .50). These findings show that BESSI captures skills that reliably predict real-world performance both academically and interpersonally. The instrument is further supported by large, differentiated norm groups, with many facets validated on samples exceeding 5,000 individuals. HiPeople administers the BESSI exactly as designed by its authors, ensuring that the full scientific validity established in the academic literature is preserved within the HiPeople assessment environment.