Abstract: Engaging persona candidates are provided with a skills assessment that includes vocal behavior. Each candidate provides both scripted and spontaneous answers to questions in a situational setting that closely matches the daily demands of the customer support industry. Samples of the candidate's speech are evaluated to identify distinct voice cues that qualitatively describe speech characteristics, which are scored based on the candidate's spoken performance. One or more of the voice cues are mapped to phonetic analytics that quantitatively describe vocal behavior. Each voice cue also has an assigned weight. The voice cue scores for each phonetic analytic are multiplied by their assigned weights and added together to form a weighted phonetic analytic, which is then used to form a part of the vocal behavior risk assessments.