Understanding the Role of Soft Skills in Hiring and Employee Development 

Technical skills simply aren’t enough reason to lock an employee. Job roles aren’t just restricted to sitting in one place and carrying out your job. Employees make up a company, and it is employees who run the company too, collectively. As an employer, you’ll need to be very clear about what type of employees you seek because they will be the ones upon whom the progress rate of your organization rests. Hence it becomes a tremendous add on if your new hire is not only well versed in their technical field, but also in overall personal skills—also known as soft skills.

As an employer, you should also develop your employees and their skills alongside your company. All-round growth is more lasting and promising than the other way around. The most obvious way to go about it is to develop your employees’ soft skills.

This article goes into detail about how important soft skills are, why you should consider them while hiring, and how you can build and carry out effective employee development.

Why All the Fuss about Soft Skills?

Soft skills are certain personality traits and characteristics that equip one to better handle diverse situations. There are various soft skills, let us have a look at a few of them and how they benefit organizations—

Public Speaking

In job roles that require one to deal with multiple people at a time, give speeches, or conduct training sessions, it is essential for the employee to be able to speak in public without inhibitions. This generally requires skills like confidence, the ability to improvise, and a sense of humor.

Teamwork

In most job roles, one is required to collaborate and interact with colleagues or clients. In jobs that are especially team-based, employees must be able to co-operate and collaborate. If this skill is neglected or not considered while hiring, there are more chances of internal conflicts and poor work quality. The worst-case scenario might harm the company tremendously and cost you precious business—the best case scenario being you get lucky and hire team workers without even trying, which is a long shot.

Decision Making

Dynamic roles require quick thinking and decision making. Knowing which option is more feasible and will yield the most result is an evaluative skill essential for decision making roles. Indecisive employees may mess up by either making the wrong choices or by failing to make a choice altogether.

Problem Solving Skills

It is not just decisions that need to be taken, but problems are also to be solved as and when they arise. And, of course, they arise quite often. It requires a mature and composed individual to be able to understand a situation and find a solution.

A lack of consideration for this skill may very well cost. Though it must be said that there isn’t any way to know for sure whether a person would be a problem-solver without actually putting them in such a situation. As complex as humans are, we sometimes tend to surprise even ourselves when in an unexpected situation.

Leadership Skills

All managerial positions require this skill. Hiring without checking leadership abilities can be disastrous for any organization. A management degree and the necessary hard skills are good bases to know that they have been qualified but you need to also check if it truly manifests in practical situations.

Leadership skills are a perk even in non-managerial positions, as this ensures quality and the possibility of promotion due to promising results.

Communication Skills

Communication skills are essential for any job role. Employees will need to interact internally and externally for the organization. The work culture, the bond between employees, and the ‘face of the company’ is essentially determined by the communication skills of the employees.

Communication skills are especially needed for roles like sales representative, customer service, HR, journalists, etc.

Emotional Intelligence

This is a quality that might be hard to make out in an interview, but it is one that can be very beneficial for all types of jobs. Emotional intelligence is being aware, understanding, and acknowledging our emotions as well as others’ emotions.

In a corporate or business setting, conflicts and misunderstandings are bound to arise. Hence, it is essential to have employees who know how to deal with them without escalating further. Most conflicts arise when a person considers only their own side and isn’t ready to listen to the other side or when a person suppresses their emotions, and then that backfires and comes out in ugly ways like misbehavior and sabotage.

Tricks to ensure a Soft Skill Inclusive Hiring Process

When hiring, hard skills are an essential requirement. However, soft skills are the flavor-inducing seasoning to the bland healthy salad that is a technically qualified candidate.

Soft skills are more subtle and cannot be truly evaluated by simply asking technical questions like with hard skills. To assess whether a candidate possesses the soft skills required for a certain job role, there are a few elements that you can add to your hiring process. This might sound tedious, but it will eventually prove beneficial as you will hire top-level candidates.

Group Discussion

GDs require a group of candidates to carry out a discussion among themselves on any given topic. The topics can vary, depending on employer requirements, from general to social, technical, or economic topics.

GDs are used by many companies and universities to gauge the candidates on a deeper level than is possible through interviews. To be able to participate well in a group discussion, a candidate needs to possess a certain level of confidence, communication skills, critical thinking, analytical capabilities, and at least a moderate level of understanding.

As an employer, you can make out, through even a short group discussion, what motivations, thought processes, and attitudes are guiding each candidate. This is a good option to go with for an all-round evaluation.

Hypothetical Scenarios

Hypothetical scenario-based questions are questions that put the candidate in a hypothetical situation where they must make a hard decision or solve a conflict.

This is less effective as what one thinks or says may not correspond to what one ends up doing in a situation, especially under pressure or in panic. However, it is a good enough evaluator of the candidate’s thought process and what type of decision maker they are.

This type of evaluation will reveal whether the candidate possesses critical thinking, quick thinking, and decision-making skills.

Referential Evaluation

Speaking to and taking feedback from a candidate’s previous employer is a good tactic to get to know about their reputation and work ethic. It also warns you away if there is any pass misconduct done by the candidate.

Group Activities

Giving candidates an activity or a task to perform together can be a pretty good way of evaluating them. However, it may prove too taxing as it would require resources and time that could otherwise be used for hiring more candidates. Though when you consider that quality is to be prioritized over quantity, it doesn’t seem that taxing anymore. But in the case of big companies who need to fill numerous posts, it becomes a difficult task.

This is better carried out with newly hired employees or even the older ones as it fulfills both the purpose of conducting an HR activity and of carrying out one that develops the soft skills and bond of employees.

Conducting Activities for Employee Development

Soft skills should be a focus not just during the hiring process but also once candidates have become employees. No one candidate can possess all qualities, so to keep updating and constantly improving the soft skills of your employees, the HR department should devise various fun and productive activities, much like the way a law firm conducts Mock Trials once in a while.

Activities can include quirky solo and group presentations, skits, event organization, etc.

Conclusion

Hiring is a process that needs to become more diverse and inclusive of various types of skills not just limited to hard skills or academic degrees. The work requirement of today itself recommends against it. An employee requires multiple skills, including problem solving, decision making, communication, critical thinking, and many more. Which ones you want a candidate to possess should be based on the job requirement and the work culture. There are also cases of employers stating in flyers or ads that soft skills are a requirement, whereas when conducting the hiring process, they do not consider soft skills at all. One reason could be their assumption that a requirement in the ad is enough to deter those who do not possess soft skills, but the truth is, it does not. Everyone knows you needn’t truly have those skills to ace the interview and land the job.

To genuinely hire quality candidates, your company needs to be clear about which skills it requires for which role, and the hiring process should be especially designed for this purpose. Otherwise, no genuine candidate with soft skills will land the job except by chance. Employee development and a tailored hiring process are a must for a company’s future and progress.

Happy Hiring!