With the rise of technological automation in the workforce, organizations must not underestimate the value of soft skills in the workplace and the impact of soft skills on the future of work. As workplaces shift to post-covid hiring strategies—and looking for more resilient and adaptable employees—hiring for soft skills will become increasingly important.
According to a LinkedIn report, 92% of HR professionals say soft skills matter as much or more than hard skills, with 80% recognizing that soft skills are increasingly important to company success.
HR pros, such as hiring managers and recruitment specialists, recognize the importance of prioritizing hiring for soft skills, with 94% identifying soft skills as an important trend for the future of hiring. It is critical for companies to make the right hiring decisions, as 89% believe that a bad hire who lacks soft skills can be costly to a business.
During the interview stage, assessing soft skills can be a challenge without a formalized process for skills assessment in place. Though recognizing their value, 57% of HR pros admit that it's a struggle to access soft skills accurately, and only 41% have a formal process in place to measure soft skills.
When a candidate recounts their past work experiences, it is easy to assess their hard skills. However, getting candidates to demonstrate their soft skills at the interview stage presents a challenge.
In fact, 68% of talent and recruitment professionals say the main way they assess soft skills is by picking up on social cues in interviews. Hiring managers can unknowingly resort to unconscious bias in their judgment of soft skills. An upbeat personality may signal that the candidate would be a great team collaborator, and nerves may indicate a lack of confidence and leadership ability—but is that truly accurate? Furthermore, observations of body language and other nonverbal cues can be misread. These initial judgments are not predictive of reality and negatively affect the accurate and consistent assessment of soft skills.
Here are some tips for improve your assessment when hiring for soft skills:
Determine the soft skills valued most at your company
These soft skills are the ones shared by your top performers and the ones needed to address future challenges your organization will face.
Identify and define the skills needed for the role
Ensure that human resources, hiring managers, and recruiters agree on the soft skills required for a role and confirm a clear definition for the position.
Remove the potential for screening bias
When reviewing prospective candidates, there's a lot of opportunity for bias in assessing talent, from the submitted application to the pre-screening call. There are a number of online assessment tools that can assist with this process, such as Talentclick and Pymetrics, which offer personality tests to analyze the candidates' behaviours and to find opportunity fit. The insights gathered can reveal aspects of the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses they may not have been picked up initially.
Standardize your interview questions
Set your hiring team up for success with consistent and structured interviews, such as by standardizing interview questions. Interviewers should be trained to ask a set of behavioural and situational questions suited to the skills you are seeking. This will lessen the unconscious bias that may filter into your judgment and allow for easy comparisons in the evaluation stage.
Ask problem-solving questions to see soft skills in action
Ask the candidate to solve a problem with hard skills, and then introduce new constraints and conditions to see in action how they adapt to change, build on feedback, and communicate their approach. For example, ask the interviewee to describe how they would create the plan for a new project, and then challenge them by introducing obstacles and deadlines to their plan and timeline to see how they would handle the situation.
As HR continues to place greater emphasis on hiring for soft skills, it’s important to make improvements on how you measure soft skills when hiring.
