A Balancing Act: The crucial intersection of Soft Skills and Role-Specific criteria for hiring success
The skills balancing act for hiring excellence
We can agree that certain skills are essential, I mean hiring accountants who can’t count, salespeople who can’t sell, or architects who can’t design doesn’t make sense. The skills criteria is often a measure, a tick box that is checked or not.
In some cases, there is scope for transferrable skills to be recognised but there are skills, let’s call them ‘soft skills’, that have become the backbone of good recruitment process and hiring success for businesses. These skills are often overlooked and not as heavily weighted as the role’s core criteria.
But why? When it’s these very skills that are the Hidden Key to Hiring Excellence!
Let’s explore the scenario: Similar companies, with similarly skilled people, find themselves with very different outcomes. The roles are the same, the skills are the same, the industry is the same, but their staff retention is vastly different – It’s obvious, they’ve missed the value of soft skills when recruiting.
This is a common occurrence as soft skills tend to be optional and take a back seat once you have ticked all the boxes. The role’s skill criteria is easier to match and once matched hard to ignore but there’s another crucial step – What about finding out if that person:
- is a decision maker or
- is someone who will inspire others or
- has a caring nature or
- wants to change things for the better?
It’s these things that contribute to excellence but they are often downplayed, maybe calling them soft skills makes it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent. Perhaps these are the talents?
At scale, companies may pay less attention to soft skills when hiring because we’ve persuaded ourselves that vocational skills need to be impersonal and let’s face it, easier to measure. If it’s easier to test for, it seems more important when selecting our team.
It’s clear that soft skills alongside role-specific abilities are the key to hiring success so let’s stop calling them soft:
They’re interpersonal skills. Leadership skills.These are skills like charisma and diligence and contribution.
What if we were to call them real skills instead?
- Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need today.
- Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down or program a computer to do.
- These are the real skills that drive the success of teams and the business!
For me, it is all about … real skills just as much as the role’s skills. It is a balancing act between the two!
FIND OUT how mme uncovers the people behind the CV ensuring the REAL skills are matched alongside the role specifics.
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