What Are Soft Skills and Why Should I Care?
Soft skills are mostly intangible, they focus more on how we do the work and less on the tasks we perform on the job. Soft skills are things like problem solving, communication, teamwork, work ethic, leadership, and adaptability.
Every top HR professional and hiring manager I have ever spoken to validates that while the ability to perform a set of tasks is most valuable in the short term, it is mastery of the softer skills that will determine long term success and drive professional growth. Most of them admit that they tend to overvalue hard skills in the hiring process, and that many Day One technical wizards flame out when the demands of the job change or when they have to collaborate with others
Soft skills are highly transferrable, hard skills less so. Every career changer I have ever met has done so by using their soft skills to bring the best out of those around them who are stronger on hard skills.
Underdevelopment of soft skills has been a problem for a while
A Carnegie Foundation for the National Engineering Society study performed by Charles R. Mann showed that 85% of job success could be attributed to well-honed soft skills while only 15% was driven by technical skills and knowledge (hard skills).
Mann found that the education system at the time did a pretty good job teaching technical skills, but that communication, collaboration, and overall job performance made more of a difference over time than did technical proficiency.
The Mann study was done in 1918.
Fast forward to a 2023 The Future of Soft Skills in the Workplace Study which revealed that 84% of their 1000 respondents believed that prospective employees need to better demonstrate soft skills in the hiring process. 89% of recruiters polled in a 2022 LinkedIn survey attributed failure to succeed in a job to a lack of soft skills.
This is great news for older workers!
Hard skills can be taught in a classroom setting or on your laptop at home. Learning technical and functional skills can usually be measured by badges and certifications. For example, once you have earned a Professional Project Manager (PMP) designation, you are officially trained in what to do as a project manager.
But anyone who has worked with a project manager knows that many of those who have earned this credential are quite poor at cross functional influencing that is required to get projects done, while others who have no certification can generate buy-in and commitment through more genuine interaction and adaptability.
Learning how to work in a team, communicate with empathy, and creatively solve problems takes time. Given that older workers have more time in service than younger ones, the odds are in their favor that they have more experience to draw from to make these adjustments and move things forward.
How to present soft skills in a resume
The reality is that hard skills are very easy to present in a resume. Sharing that you built a program using Python or maintained a Salesforce database is a pretty straightforward proposition. But how do you show that you can communicate with people or solve problems in a meaningful way? Claiming to be a certified scrum master is a matter of fact, while alleging to be a great team player is hearsay.
The best way is to build stories around the soft skills to demonstrate that you produced the impact required in the job using the skills in question. Phrases like:
Built a regional sales team to capture 30% market share within the first two years
Rolled out a program using SharePoint to improve cross functional communication and collaboration, resulting in a 25% reduction in error rate and less duplication of effort
Solved company X’s longstanding employee attrition problem by upgrading recognition and onboarding programs. These programs increased retention by 46% and employee satisfaction scores by 35%
Instead of taking this approach, most job seekers feebly claim these skills in a summary statement at the top of the resume. I can’t tell you how many “creative, out of the box self-starters with great communications skills” I have met over the years. The problem is that the fact that you say you are these things doesn’t do much to prove them.
Listing these skills in the summary isn’t a bad thing. I sometimes do it in the resumes I write. But it is much more effective to tie skills to accomplishments in a job than to claim them out of context.
For more info on building a resume, I share insights on formatting in my post from August 2023 and on content my February 2024 newsletter.
How to present soft skills in interviews
Interviewers tend to be short sighted and focus their questions on who can do the job on Day One. They are therefore less likely to fully consider how well the candidate will meet their needs a year or two down the line.
Therefore, it is up to candidates to demonstrate, not just talk about, those soft skills through both content and behavior. Framing the interview as a conversation and not an interrogation helps.
Know that there is no need to tell people that you are a good communicator if you are one in the interview.
Good communicators ask questions during an interview to demonstrate sincere interest regarding how they can help and what they may need to solve. They don’t just respond to an interviewer’s questions and wait until the interview is nearly over to ask a question to fine tune understanding of why they are there.
You would never go to a business meeting that was focused on a problem your boss had and not ask any questions until s/he gave you permission or leave the meeting with no clue what their objective was. Demonstrate what you would be like in the job by being that way in the interview.
Good communicators are considerate to adjust how and what they present to match the audience perspective. You should customize your responses to match the scale of the opportunity to make it easy for the listener to connect the dots. Older workers are more likely than young ones to discuss accomplishments that far exceed the needs of a position and are then gob smacked when they are told they are overqualified.
In a business setting, you would never set up a meeting with sales to talk about issues in the finance department. But many job seekers go to interviews with rehearsed one size fits all answers that they are hellbent to share whether it is relevant to the point of view of the interviewer or not.
The most important intangibles to convey in an interview are enthusiasm to do the work, the ability to communicate with the hiring manager, and flexibility to work with those around you. Flexing what you say and how you say it to each individual interviewer conveys this ability much more than just claiming that ability does.
Regarding the other soft skills, you should take the same storytelling approach as with the resume. In addition to making sure your stories are relevant to the induvial interviewer, make sure to attribute your success to your ability to work cross functionally, adapt to a new situation, or whichever soft skill is in your toolbox fills the bill.
For more tips on interviewing, check out Job Guy’s April 2024 and October 2023 posts.
Final thought on selling soft skills
In general, both job seekers and hiring managers underperform when it comes to valuing and presenting soft skills.
The reality is that candidates are often hired for hard skills but succeed based on the softer ones. Employers would be well off to focus more on this dynamic in their selection process. Job seekers need to do better articulating how they have used those skills in the past and how those skills were the driver of that success.
Help the interviewer to recognize that it is you that they really want over the person who can do the job today but will be less equipped to meet the needs of tomorrow! They will more likely see it too.
