Getting a hold of that soft stuff
The future of work, from the rise of the gig economy to remote working, is changing fast. People and companies must evolve to meet the new pressures.
The rise of the internet in the late 20th century gave rise to what is widely referred to as the knowledge economy, based on the production of services and knowledge intensive activities, rather than material goods and products. Today that transition is complete. Amazon, Google, Facebook, are some of the most valuable companies, the world’s largest taxi fleet Uber does not own any vehicles, Airbnb, the world’s largest hotel chain, does not own a room, the list goes on. In the new economy,the emphases on a diverse range of skills, especially so-called ‘soft skills’, is higher than ever. Yet companies hiring strategies have yet to make the leap forward.
Soft skills is an extremely broad umbrella that's groups a whole range of seemingly intangible assets: Emotional Intelligence (EQ), social relations, communication, learn-ability, and so on. In truth, these skills have always been important. But its demand in the modern workplace is at an all-time high as more workers spend their time, augmented by computers and software, building services not objects, spending more time collaborating with people and creating knowledge products. Factor in automation which is changing the nature of jobs by demanding workers allocate freed up time to more cognitive-dependent tasks that involve use of soft skills.
Business leaders and educators increasingly acknowledge that in a hyper-competitive work environment, peoples’ success is determined by their ability to work with other people and thrive within the culture of a company rather than simply the knowledge they possess. Today more than ever, EQ, defined as “the ability to recognise and understand both how you and how those around you feel” is “a better predictor of success in the workplace than IQ”, say Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy, authors of No Hard Feelings: Emotions At Work (And How They Help Us Succeed).
Several studies on the changing demands on the workforce reflect this.
According to the Harvard Business Review, communication and emotional competence are two of seven skills that will not be automated in the near future and should be prioritised. In a crowded information space with a high noise to signal ratio people must be able to contextualise information and be effective storytellers. According to a 2019 study on the Future of Work by LinkedIn the top five soft skills to succeed are persuasion, collaboration, adaptability and time management. The rapidly changing business environment means the demand for skills and technical know-how is changing faster than ever. It used to be that the knowledge and skills acquired by workers early in life was enough to keep them employed until retirement. Chipped away over recent decades, today this is no longer assumed. People are expected to keep learning and improving their skills. It's no surprise that ‘learnability’ is identified by the WEF as one of the key traits companies must look for.
This is not to say that hard skills are to be dismissed. They remain a core requirement and barrier to entry to most industries. Rare or difficult to obtain technical skills will remain in high demand. However, outside that bracket, when assessing a large group of people who all possess the basic pre-requisite skills to do a job, most of which are easily verifiable, how do you decide on which person is the right person to succeed in your company? As an employer how do you optimise your hiring to assess a candidates’ soft skills before you hire?
This is a problem we at LeapIn spend a lot of time thinking about.
We understand, whether you are a large multinational or a startup, hiring is critical to success. Yet established hiring practices are lacking. CVs have a lot of information but it is impossible to gather insight into EQ, personality, and other soft skills. Phone interviews help shed some light, however, they require a considerable outlay of resources, both people and time, which many companies don't have. Even for those that do, inevitably, only a fraction of applications make the cut — always opening up the risk of missing out on a potential high performer before even meeting them.
Which is why we built and optimised our AI video Interview to help fix this problem.
In a short interview, LeapIn’s algorithms assess a number of key soft skills, such as openness, leadership, extroversion, among others, and predict whether the candidate fits your company’s culture and the job role. We also recognise that success and culture varies from company and industry. Therefore we model your company culture based on your employees which helps inform recommendations and predictions.
Through the AI video Interview you can “meet” every candidate and equip yourself with a new set of data organised to help you make better hiring decisions.
LeapIn’s technology is built on decades of research into human psychology, especially micro emotions, speech, and language. Thanks to recent breakthroughs in deep learning, enabled by both availability of large data sets and better algorithms, we are able to apply techniques facial expression recognition (FER) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse over thousands of facial micro-emotions and tones in just one 15 minute interview.
For candidates, this is another opportunity to shine. For HR is a tool to make better, more informed decisions when making the cut for in-person interviews.
To stay at the cutting edge companies must evolve their HR strategies to get ahead in the future of work. Visit https://leapin-ai.com to schedule your demo, today.