A list of the 7 essential soft skills for revealing hidden talent... and recruiting it!
According to Altays, 62% of managers and executives with managerial responsibilities are willing to recruit a candidate primarily on the basis of behavioral skills. Knowledge hard-won at school no longer has a central place with recruiters. Today, soft skills, in other words personal aptitudes, are decisive for an employee and for meeting your recruitment needs.
But while technical knowledge is easily distinguished by diplomas or assessments, how do you identify soft skills in your candidates? No problemo, in this article co-written with Déborah Romain-Delacour, we give you the keys to a successful recruitment process! 🤩
Why have soft skills become as essential as hard skills?
Hard skills are the technical skills acquired at school, in training or through professional experience. They are easily identifiable and measurable during a job interview, thanks in particular to diplomas or previous positions held.
If hard skills are so easy to identify, why are recruiters looking for candidates with developed soft skills? 🤔
It's all well and good to have a thorough grasp of one's profession, but it's even better to be able to demonstrate the interpersonal skills needed to integrate easily into one's company! Soft skills include collective behavior or behavioral faculties that you're not really taught at school, but which are a major need for any profession.
In short, soft skills make for a better working environment that's conducive to performance, and that's what every good recruiter is looking for, isn't it? 😉
| Hard skills | Soft skills |
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Microsoft Office Data interpretation Financial planning Copywriting Project management Spoken languages |
Communication skills Time management skills Critical thinking skills Leadership Motivation Ambition Negotiation skills |
Adapted from © Valamis
A word from the expert
Soft skills are indispensable. It's not enough to have know-how or expertise in a field, you also need to be able to communicate this expertise, work in a team, manage your emotions, show empathy, be organized, etc. Soft skills are necessary to
adapt to the world of work and develop new skills.
What are the 7 soft skills to look out for in talent?
We've put together the top 7 soft skills we think are essential for top candidates! 🔥
#1 Adaptability
Since the emergence of teleworking with the health crisis, new expectations have been demanded by recruiters. Who would have thought that over 70% of companies would (in spite of themselves) adopt hybrid working? Absolutely no one, and yet some employees have adapted perfectly to the situation in a very short space of time.
No matter what happens in the future, an employee with good adaptability will be able to cope with any situation... pretty reassuring for you. 😌
#2 Critical thinking
With the increasing flow of information on a daily basis, a faculty of this kind is much in demand in the workplace. Critical thinking is about taking a step back from our environment, confronting a multitude of ideas, filtering different information and finding the most useful to face a problem.
#3 Stress management
Stress is one of the main problems affecting the daily lives of employees. It causes us to expend a lot of energy and diminishes our cognitive abilities. 🤯
Knowing how to manage stress therefore enables you to remain calm in the face of pressure or an abnormal situation, so you can make the right decisions in a rational manner. This asset is particularly advantageous for managers who are under a lot of pressure and need to manage it so as not to pass it on to their teams.
#4 Emotional intelligence
Identifying other people's emotions, as well as one's own, is one of those skills that wasn't really considered necessary a few years ago, yet it's only recently that this quality has come to the top of the list.
There's nothing like an employee who understands his or her fellow workers to establish a framework of trust.
#5 Problem solving
Finding suitable solutions to new problems requires reasoning, intuition... and a fair amount of motivation. 💪
By being able to overcome the difficulties encountered within the company, a candidate with this ability can boost your performance in addition to being a comforting support for all the managers in your organization. He's the one on whom your confidence rests, and that's a relief!
#6 Creativity
Essential to your company's ability to innovate and its originality. Hiring a creative person is always useful to bring unique ideas that you wouldn't have thought of, and so set yourself apart from the competition!
#7 Autonomy
Being autonomous means setting your own objectives, carrying out your missions without asking your n+1, and finding the resources you need for your tasks yourself. In short, it's the Mike Horn that every company wants.
A word from the expert
There's one soft skill I'd like to talk about, because it's still little-known in France, yet number 1 in Korea. It's called "nunchi" and there's no direct translation into French. It's a socio-emotional skill that Koreans learn from childhood, in the family and at school. It's a soft skill that's indispensable in this collectivist society, in which looking out for others is deeply rooted culturally.
In fact, nunchi brings together a whole range of soft skills that it's good to know how to mobilize together:
- empathy: putting yourself in other people's shoes;
- emotion and impulse management: understanding spontaneousreactions and adapting them as best we can;
- attention: knowing how to detect what is not directly visible.
Nunchi is therefore a soft skill that enables us to build positive social relationships with others, and thus develop individual and collective well-being. An essential prerequisite for a high-performance, creativesociety .
How do you test for soft skills?
As you know, it's difficult to identify your candidates' soft skills, especially when there are dozens of different ones. But there are some that speak for themselves, such as candidates with good interview communication skills, sharp team spirit or stress management skills.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways to help you.
Social networks
You can play detective and investigate your candidates. 🕵️♀️ Be sure to take a good, hard look at what you see (especially photos of drunken nights out and of the younger candidates). The aim is to find elements that give you an idea of their personality, such as their passions, the books they like to read or other such information.
Psychometric tests
Be careful with this one!
If you use a questionnaire, candidates will tend to value themselves. But having an idea of their answers can still be very interesting and give you some guidance. Don't hesitate to discuss this with your candidate during the interview, to make sure that what they say is true.
Personality tests are also a very good way of finding out about your candidates' personal aptitudes.
MyCommunIT is a SaaS platform where candidates and recruiters meet. What makes it special? A digitally schematized soft skills personality test for recruiters! The candidate completes a questionnaire, then 9 personality traits are presented for each of them, making your choice easier.
Role-playing
Nothing beats recruitment by simulation! Very much in vogue this year, seeing with your own eyes the actions of your candidates during a practical exercise can help you make your final choice, as well as being great fun! 🥳
The importance of the exercise is not really the final success, but rather the way the candidates act, their interactions to deal with the problem, the time they devote to it, etc. All the same, take into account their stress, which can weigh in the balance in the event of great difficulty, but on the whole a simulation is much more fun and brings out their potential, so it's up to you to be creative and create your own simulation! 🤩
A word from the expert
There's a real buzz around soft skills, and some tests are riding the wave, promising a detailed analysis of soft skills in the workplace. But tests are not magic. It's important to use scientifically validated psychometric tests. But these tests must be taken with a grain of salt, as there is always a margin of error.
In my opinion, soft skills are revealed in situations: in expression and in action. It is therefore essential for recruiters to be able to organize qualitative interviews with candidates, based on a set of open-ended questions , so that they can express themselves freely.
To achieve this, the recruiter needs to know how to create a climate of trust, and that means adopting an authentic posture: simply being yourself, and taking a genuine interest in the person you're talking to. Candidates who are listened to and feel confident can then be themselves. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved, and helps avoid recruitment errors.
In addition, wherever possible, it's important to put candidates into action: empowering them to reveal their skills and, above all, their potential for development, which will manifest itself through the expression of their soft skills in situations: listening, questioning , collaboration, emotional management, planning, organization, creativity, etc. Giving the candidatea practical case to solve can be a good way of gaining access to these skills.
Finally, it's important never to forget that soft skills develop over time, so a recruiter needs to be able to identify which soft skills are essential for the job, and which can be developed at a later stage through professional practice or training.
So, have you mastered the soft skills that are essential in the corporate world?
Soft skills are essential to finding the best talent for your recruitment process. In addition to providing a stable working environment, your employees have that little something that makes them indispensable to the company!
The methods for identifying them aren't simple, but with enough attention, you're bound to find your match! 👍
Article translated from French