Why Soft Skills Are Important

From a recent thread here on LinkedIn (started by Michael Goldberg), it appears that more and more companies are weighing soft skills more heavily in the job interview process.

While one candidate may have looked great on paper with all the right education and work experience, a company may have come to find that they didn’t mesh well with the rest of the team. Or they may have had little understanding of how to communicate about their work to outside teams or even customers.

Job seekers or career changers are in luck because these days, companies are tired of making hires that simply don’t function well within their workplace. 

What are soft skills?

While hard skills are learned, soft skills are the things you bring to a job naturally. Things like your personality, natural talents, personal attributes, and insights. They shape how a person interacts with others effectively and cooperatively as well as how they go about solving new problems.

Some of the attributes that these include:

• Emotional Intelligence
• Problem-solving
• Communication
• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Goal-orientation
• Intellectual horsepower (one’s processing speed)
• Organization
• Tenacity
• Analytical thinking
• Self-starter
• Professional/Mature
• Adaptability

According to ICIMS, “Ninety-four percent of recruiting professionals believe an employee with stronger soft skills has a better chance of being promoted to a leadership position than an employee with more years of experience but weaker soft skills.”

Soft skills can be the differentiator between whether or not you or someone slightly more qualified lands a job. If you have all the job requirements on paper, but lack the skills to connect with your team and communicate your ideas, the job may go to someone who can. Using your soft skills, you’ll also hopefully be able to build a rapport with the hiring manager during your interview.

However, these skills aren’t just important for intercommunication.

How can you improve your soft skills?

Although soft skills are considered to be those useful on-the-job traits that come naturally to us, we can improve them. Anyone can practice and improve their written and oral communication skills.

Other skills like emotional intelligence, being a self-starter, or adaptability may take more effort to improve, but if you’re able to commit to developing a new habit that will enhance your job-related skills, then go for it!

Skills like tenacity, energy, and creativity, on the other hand, may be harder to develop; instead of trying to gain more soft skills, try working on improving the ones that come naturally to you.

How to show off your soft skills

If you’re a job-seeker that doesn’t have much by the way of experience yet, your shining personality may come in handy, especially if a company is looking to fill a role and is willing to train “the right person.”

First, narrow down the soft skills you believe you’re best at and confirm your list with a friend or colleague (the soft skills you’re not so great at may be examples of what to mention when the question “What are your weaknesses?” comes up. Because it will).

Instead of simply including a bulleted list on your resume of your soft skills, during an interview try to reference times when you used them in past work environments.

Overall, you’ll want to talk about your soft skills in a way that highlights what you can bring to a role and how they’ll help you improve the company. Give real-life examples and don’t try to convince anyone you have personality traits that you really just don’t. Sooner or later, someone will be able to tell.