It’s hard to overestimate the importance of soft skills in a modern workplace. Very few industries and corporate cultures today are isolated, and the success of a company often depends on productive team collaboration. Besides, the rapidly changing business and tech landscape regularly poses new challenges that promote flexibility and adaptability.
All of those are examples of soft skills — personal characteristics that have become vital for the majority of industries and positions. The main challenge is that soft skills are hard to measure. The traditional recruitment approach, for example, has a lot of gaps when identifying candidates’ soft skills. But then again, the modern workplace requires adaptability from everyone, including recruiters.
Below, we will explain which soft skills are crucial in today’s professional environment, suggest several strategies that can help identify them, and offer a few more tips for nurturing these skills during the onboarding stage.
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Must-Have Soft Skills for a Productive Workplace
Depending on the company and job vacancy, the ideal soft skill set for a candidate differ. Still, recruiters will never go wrong if they prioritize the following skills:
- Communication: listening to how the candidate presents oneself is the surest way to assess communication skills.
- Motivation & Confidence: confident candidates always make a very good impression during the interview, but recruiters should also try to find out what drives the person. Motivation and desire to grow professionally are some of the skills that can lead entire teams to success.
- Negotiation: not every interview allows assessing negation skills, but a series of additional questions can help recruiters get some general idea of the candidate’s ability to negotiate — for example, questions about solving potential conflicts.
- Problem-solving: questions about conflict resolution can also be helpful in assessing a candidate’s problem-solving skills. Or, interviewers can describe a few work situations and ask candidates how they would solve those.
- Critical and/or creative thinking: both are necessary in today’s workplace, but some job openings prioritize one over another. Situational questions can be helpful here — and it is also possible to use behavioral tests to evaluate these skills.
Best Strategies to Evaluate Candidates’ Soft Skills
The first (and probably the most important) step is to define which soft skills are necessary for a new job opening. Here, it is equally important to consider how these skills align with the character traits of established team members. It is also possible that some skills may enhance the team while others may have a disruptive effect.
The next steps to simplify the candidate evaluation process include:
Create Pre-Interview Behavioral Questions
In the traditional recruitment process, candidate screening is usually about assessing hard skills and past experiences, but it does not necessarily have to end there. Depending on your company, you can add a few behavioral tests to the hiring process — anything from the famous 16 personality types and emotional intelligence tests to more specific pre-employment tests can give recruiters a better idea of their candidates.
Of course, when dealing with well-known tests, there is always a risk that a candidate may tweak the questions in an attempt to make a favorable impression. So before sending any behavioral assessments, recruiters should explain why it is so important to answer truthfully — ideally, after a few in-person conversations.
Here, it is vital to stress that the behavioral assessment is not about ‘good and bad’ or ‘right and wrong’ but rather about finding people who would best fit the existing team. That is, honesty is the best policy for everyone because no one likes to join a team where they feel out of place.
Use Relevant Situational Judgment Tests
Situational Judgment Tests (STJs) can be another great way to see how a candidate would behave in specific work-related situations. Depending on the number of situations you would like to recreate, these tests can be assigned either in the pre-interview stage or asked directly during an interview. As a rule, the second option is better. This way, candidates will have less time to think the situation over and will most likely give answers that actually reflect their personality.
Another benefit of using SJTs during a personal interview is that recruiters have a chance to observe candidates’ emotional responses — and watching for non-verbal cues is one of the surest ways to adequately assess candidates’ skills and personalities.
Ask Candidates Which Skills They Find Necessary
During the interview, ask candidates which soft skills they think are necessary for the job. The answer to this question shows how accurately a person understands future job responsibilities, which is a very good indicator of how well the candidate might deal with them.
Sometimes, this answer may not fully align with the recruiters’ expectations of the necessary skills. In fact, it rarely does. Still, it gives a very good understanding of candidates’ professionalism. If you would like to test critical thinking during this stage, ask a few additional questions about skills the candidates failed to mention and ask them to explain why these skills were excluded.
Discuss Candidates’s Soft Skills with their References
Finally, you can ask previous employers about the candidate’s soft skills. A personal opinion about a college is one of the most important questions when checking references. But to get a comprehensive answer, you need to contact someone who knows the candidate well yet remains unbiased. This is often challenging, so HRs should reach out to past employers only after they’ve formed their own opinion about a job candidate. This way, they stand a better chance of avoiding bias themselves.
These tips cannot ensure 100% accuracy, of course, because soft skills assessment is not an exact science. However, carefully compiled tests related to realistic workplace scenarios can be very helpful for candidate evaluation. Besides, if you choose to employ this candidate, there is always onboarding, which often acts as a trial period. To make this period successful, HRs should consider the strategies described below.
How to Promote Relevant Skills During Onboarding
There is a good reason why ideal candidates who need no training or onboarding are called purple squirrels in recruitment jargon. But they could just as well be called unicorns — because such magical creatures simply do not exist. Surprisingly, over half of employers ignore soft skills training in their onboarding programs.
At the same time, the highly ‘receptive’ time when a new member joins an established team is a perfect opportunity for improving some soft skills and bringing the new colleague up to par with existing team policies.
Do not waste such a unique opportunity; start nurturing soft skills with a relevant onboarding program. Some functional strategies may include:
- Clear definition of expectations: it is important to clearly define internal company policies and developments, explaining which soft skills are necessary for these goals and why.
- Interactive training sessions: group activities, role-playing team exercises, and discussion can be a great way to break the ice and teach new colleagues some relevant skills, both soft and hard.
- Mentorship programs: pairing a new employee with an experienced colleague who excels at necessary soft skills is a great way to foster teamwork and teach some relevant skills in the process.
- Regular feedback and assessment: lack of recognition is a common problem in the workplace, and it can be especially destructive in the onboarding stage, where comprehensive feedback and assessment are vital for establishing productive collaboration.
- Learning resources: creating learning materials, i.e., case studies, reports, or anything else that can show the importance of specific soft skills in a company, can be an effective strategy for training newcomers with minimal time and resource investment.
- Celebration of success stories: most importantly, team leads and managers should celebrate success stories, highlighting which soft skills made success possible. This strategy kills two birds with one stone — recognizes their colleagues’ effort and leads the rest of the team by example, so you simply cannot go wrong with choosing this tactic.
Technically, all of these strategies will help with the continuous promotion of soft skills in a workplace, not just while onboarding newcomers. So, HRs should consider implementing such initiatives for all employees. Still, the reason why these strategies are so important during onboarding is that they help set very clear expectations and also show support from management. And that is a very important factor that minimizes employee turnover and boosts productivity.
Conclusion
Candidate soft skills assessment is not an exact science, which makes it so challenging. Still, the screening tests, interview techniques, and onboarding tips above should be very helpful in choosing the best talent for your team. All in all, it goes down to understanding company goals, keeping your eyes open during the interview, and setting clear expectations for the newcomers.
The final word of advice to make the hiring process not only effective but also speedy is to set up and regularly maintain functional recruiting pipelines for maximum efficiency. We have already explained the benefits of a talent pipeline strategy for the hiring process, with tips on how to create your pipeline, in our previous post.
And if you want to take your hiring efforts to a whole new level, read how to manage recruiting pipelines with SignalHire — our tool for finding the top human talent and simplifying the hiring process.
