A Complete Guide to Soft Skills
Soft skills: they’re a hot topic in the HR world right now, thanks to a fast-changing labor market in the past few years, with more changes likely coming in the years ahead. HR leaders and executives are focusing more on hiring and training for soft skills like communication, writing, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
This focus is backed up by scientific research that shows how vital these skills are to a successful workforce. A stunning 85% of job success comes from soft skills and people skills, and only 15% from hard skills, according to research from Harvard.
Since soft skills are, well, softer and harder to define than hard skills, they’re more complicated to understand and put to use for your organization. That’s why we created this comprehensive guide to everything you need to know about soft skills: what they are, why they matter, how to assess them, and how to hire and train for them. Let’s dive in.
What Are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are characteristics and interpersonal skills that affect how a person interacts with others in the workplace. Some examples of the most common soft skills include:
- Communication, including the ability to actively listen and communicate ideas both orally and in writing
- Teamwork, including working well with others, supporting team members, and being professional and polite to everyone
- Customer service, including anticipating customer needs and serving and supporting them courteously and helpfully
- Critical thinking, including goal-oriented thinking and the ability to see the big picture
- Dependability, including showing up to work reliably and on time, meeting deadlines, and being trustworthy in delivering tasks and projects
- Initiative, including being a resourceful self-starter who comes up with great ideas on their own to improve their and the team’s work
- Work quality, including delivering accurate work with good attention to detail, being organized, and being able to prioritize effectively
Soft skills are often referenced in opposition to hard skills, which are more focused on knowing tools, software, and tasks. While soft skills are not as easy to assess and hire for as hard skills, they are just as vital to creating an engaged, productive workforce.
Why Soft Skills Are Important
Soft skills are essential to creating a great workplace culture for one simple reason: workplaces are full of people, and even with the most incredible hard skills, your team members also need soft skills to effectively get their work done and get along with others.
There’s much more to being great in a role than successfully completing tasks — most of our work lives require collaborating and cooperating with other people at many different levels, and soft skills measure how adept each worker is at those critical elements.
Also, with the way we work changing rapidly (including the rise of AI, remote work, and the shifting of necessary hard skills), the ability to be flexible, to think critically and problem-solve and to work with people across departments is even more important than ever. Soft skills help future-proof your workforce by ensuring your people are ready to adapt to whatever the future brings, instead of hiring for experience in a certain software tool that you might not even be using in two years. They can help fill skills gaps, too.
Soft skills are also vital to hire for because they’re more difficult to train for than hard skills: it’s much more complicated to train someone to turn into a good listener or creative thinker, for example, than to teach them how to use Excel formulas or a specific tool. It’s not impossible to train for soft skills, as we’ll discuss shortly, but it is harder.
How to Assess Soft Skills
How can you accurately measure whether someone is an active listener, a problem-solver, or a critical thinker as part of the hiring process? Since soft skills are more subjective than hard skills, they can seem challenging to gauge, but hiring assessments have evolved to include measuring soft skills as well as hard ones.
Cangrade’s Pre-Hire Assessments, for example, are designed to include vital soft skills information on candidates that help determine their success in their potential new role. Soft skills tests can help you avoid making expensive hiring mistakes by getting the right people in the door the first time.
With the right interview questions, you can also follow up on the information gathered with these assessments to further evaluate a candidate’s soft skills. Asking how the candidate would handle certain situations with colleagues or customers, for example, can clarify their thinking and aptitudes for the kind of work they’ll be doing.
Best Practices for Hiring for Soft Skills
What are the best practices you should keep in mind when hiring for soft skills? Here are a few key points to follow (and be sure to read up on the ones to avoid as well).
Know Exactly What You Need
While it’s tempting to just throw every soft skill you can think of on the list of attributes you’d like your new hire to have, that’s just going to make the standards impossibly high. Instead, consider exactly which soft skills are indispensable, which are helpful but not a deal-breaker, and which ones aren’t important for the role so you can target precisely what you need.
Build Your Hiring Process Around Them
Instead of just shoehorning soft skills into your existing hiring process as an add-on, try re-orienting your hiring process to be based more around them by moving towards a skills-based hiring model.
Balance Hard and Soft Skill Needs
It’s not an either-or proposition to hire for soft skills or hard skills: both are important in creating a successful organization and in filling individual roles too. If you’re only hiring for soft skills, you might end up with employees who can’t do the job, and if you only hire for hard skills, you might miss out on exceptional employees. Be sure to think about both kinds of skills, and use assessments that allow you to test for both when hiring.
How to Train for Soft Skills
While not every soft skill is trainable, many are. Soft skills training for employees is possible because if you look at the major component all trainable soft skills have in common, they’re related to communication. Fortunately, you can absolutely train people to become better communicators (if they’re willing to learn, that is). Think of communication like leadership — yes, a few lucky people are born great, but many of the greatest actually learned and trained themselves to be better.
The willingness to learn, however, is an essential ingredient here. If someone is resistant to feedback, coaching, and personal development, it’s not possible to turn them into a better communicator and collaborator. So it’s best to actively hire people who are happy to be life-long learners and look to constantly improve themselves, as well as being open to feedback.
You can actively train your existing workforce to be better interpersonal communicators, both as active listeners and at communicating big ideas and small tasks alike. Be sure to give them good training materials and development sessions tailored to their interests and learning styles: this isn’t going to be a one-size-fits-all exercise. Yale University has a good set of training materials on critical soft skills that can serve as a solid starting place.
Learning new soft skills isn’t just a one-time exercise though. You should also work to create a culture of learning and continuous development at your organization. This allows everyone to continue growing and improving their skills of all kinds. It also creates an environment that helps people feel safe to learn and make mistakes (a critical part of growth), while also being held accountable and open to feedback because they know it’s coming from a positive place.
Leadership Shifts in Hiring for Soft Skills
Starting to hire for soft skills isn’t as simple as asking a few extra questions in candidate interviews – not if you truly want to change the culture of your organization. There are also leadership and management shifts that will need to take place to bring about this change in hiring practices, recruitment priorities, and upskilling your existing employees.
First, leadership and HR need to have a vision for a skills-based hiring process instead of relying on outdated fallbacks like relying too much on resumes, education, and unstructured interviews. Those are not only less equitable but less accurate at predicting success in a role than a skills-based approach.
Leaders also must have a long-term, big-picture vision for the future of their workforce as a whole. What will your company need to be successful today, in five years, and a decade or more from now? Then you can look at what skills and aptitudes will be the most impactful to get you there, and you can develop both an upskilling and hiring plan that takes all of those needs into account.
Your whole leadership team needs to be on board with this vision for the future of your company, as they’re responsible for communicating it and selling it to hiring managers as well. Those are the people who are on the ground making key hiring decisions, and they need to play their part in turning it from a vision to a reality.
Takeaways
Soft skills are often the unsung heroes of a successful workplace: but they don’t just appear in your employees. Getting to a workforce full of the most critical soft skills means proactively developing hiring processes that prioritize soft skills, like hiring assessments, as well as upskilling your existing employees to hone their soft skills. Once you get through this process to shift what you prioritize in your people, and to bring out their best, you’ll see a huge productivity and positivity shift in your organization that will take it to the next level.