How to Use Your Human Skills to Get Hired

There are soft skills. Then, there are hard skills. Hard skills are things like knowing how to play the piano. Soft skills are more human, such as interpersonal communication, public speaking, leadership, etc. Many people think hard skills are the ticket to a successful job search, but soft skills are more important than you may think.

Al Dea , who is the founder of The Edge of Work Consulting , sat down with LinkedIn News Editor Andrew Seaman to discuss how soft skills help you laser in and focus on your own job search and career development plan. Al also breaks down how soft skills can be used to prove yourself once you land your job.

BONUS: Al will join Andrew on the next broadcast of #GetHired Live on Wednesday, February 22, at 12 p.m. ET. to answer your questions about using soft skills during your job search. Get your questions in now by leaving them as a comment?on this event . You can also RSVP for the broadcast?by clicking here .

TRANSCRIPT: How to Use Your Human Skills to Get Hired

Andrew Seaman: Everything we do can be considered a skill. While people often focus on technical skills like knowing how to use a certain computer program, human skills are those that can't be easily replicated by a computer. On today's show, we're talking all about improving those human skills and letting them shine to help secure your next job.

From LinkedIn News, this is Get Hired, a podcast for the ups and downs and the ever-changing landscape of our professional lives. I'm Andrew Seaman, LinkedIn's managing editor for Jobs and Career Development.

When it comes to skills, there are two types. There are those that we're generally born with known as soft skills, and those we learn from others known as hard skills. For example, most people naturally develop the ability to converse with people one-on-one. Meanwhile, we need to learn at least the basics of reading music from someone if we want to play an instrument. People often incorrectly believe that those hard skills tend to be more valuable on a resume, but those human-based skills are usually equally, if not more important.

Al Dea, who is the founder of Better Work Labs, has turned his love for those uniquely human skills into a business. He shares his knowledge about soft skills and how to use them with companies, but today he's joining us to tell us how we can use them to stand out during the job search, how they can be used to prove yourself during the hiring process, and during the job itself.

Before we get to today's conversation though, I want to let you know that Al will join me on Wednesday, February 22nd at noon eastern time on Get Hired Live to go deeper into this topic and answer your questions. You can find the RSVP link for Get Hired Live in the show notes.

Also, a quick disclaimer about today's discussion. Some of the soft skills that we're going to talk about today don't always come as naturally to some people as they do to others. That's okay. We all have different strengths and can utilize those during the hiring process. I look forward to discussing that on a future episode of this podcast.

Now, back to today's conversation. I first wanted to know where AL's curiosity for his career started.

Al Dea: In college, I studied marketing and theology, and I think I was just always really interested in solving problems and working with people, and that led me to start my career in management consulting where I spent some time at Deloitte. And when I was at Deloitte, my work really came at this intersection of, how do we help companies implement new technology and then use that technology to better serve their customers and their employees? And at the fundamental crux of that question is how do you get people to work together in new ways?

And after some time, I loved technology and I loved working in consulting, but what I really wanted to do was to think about how do we actually build that innovative technology and bring it to people? And so as you mentioned, I worked in marketing then at Salesforce. But again, I just had this curiosity about exploring this idea of how do you get people to work together to use things to achieve goals?

And in my time both at Deloitte and Salesforce, I think the thing that I enjoyed the most was just being able to work with people to facilitate change, to get people to work together to bring their strengths and skills so that they could be effective. And this spurred this just genuine curiosity for how do we teach people those skills, those human skills that make them successful whether they're individual employees or managers and leaders. And so what I do now is I work with companies and their employees to help their employees build those human skills they need to work together, to achieve outcomes across continents. And at the end of the day though, I think what it all comes back to are those things that I think we're going to talk about today and those soft skills that enable people to work together to achieve more.

Andrew: Yeah, I think a lot of times people, they hear soft skills, they hear hard skills. What is the difference between soft skills and hard skills? What are the differences and what should people know about them?

Al: I would say that soft skills really describe how you work and interact with others. Oftentimes, people describe them as the personality traits, the behaviors, those interpersonal skills that we use to interact with other people. In the workplace, it oftentimes involves not just working by yourself but working with others. And I like to almost think of the soft skills as the how for when you're working with others, how you get things done or how you complete a specific task or a project or function.

And I think the thing about the soft skills that oftentimes makes them unique is that they are sometimes those skills that are applicable across the diversity of different professions. As an example, being able to communicate effectively, that matters very much if you're working in the technology industry as it does if you are working in the consumer package goods industry or across functions. And that might be another difference between some of the softer skills and the technical skills, whereas some of those technical skills that someone in the technology industry might need, some of those harder skills might be relevant to that specific industry, but it may not be as relevant to another industry. And so I think the other thing that makes some of those soft skills unique is that they do have a little bit of applicability across a diversity of different industries and functions

Andrew: And hard skills, obviously, those are the ones where maybe you know a specific programming language, maybe you know a certain computer system, but in reality, the soft skills are the things that really can't be replaced by computers. They can't be automated in most cases, right?

Al: That's a great point. Some of those technical skills, some of those harder skills, they're easier to see, and perhaps even on paper, quantify. Whereas some of the soft skills, and it's not that they're not less important, but sometimes they're a little bit harder, at least on the surface, to be able to measure and to quantify, which I think often, perhaps, getting back to what you were saying initially, sometimes makes them a little bit harder to pin down. It doesn't necessarily make the most important, but at least it makes it a little bit harder to objectively quantify the impact of them on paper.

Andrew: And I think that's so interesting oftentimes about soft skills is that everyone has some baseline.

Al: Yes.

Andrew: So you're never usually starting from zero in most cases. And the question is, are you good at this? Are you very good at this? And if you've put effort into it already, you're starting from somewhere, right?

Al: Absolutely. And I think that is the joy and perhaps the opportunity with soft skills is that even if you don't think you're great at one of them, the best place to start is right where you are because everyone does have some baseline of what they are, even if they aren't perhaps as advanced. And the reality of it is, I think in today's workplace is that because they are needed so much every day, if you want, you have the ability to get better. I don't think that's going away anytime soon.

Andrew: You hit on an important point because I've heard people in the past say, "Soft skills are the things that you can't learn," and maybe you can't learn, but you can't improve, right?

Al: I think what they mean is that it is really hard to teach them in terms of being able to knowledge transfer to someone else how to do a specific thing. If we take something like Python as an example, there are lots of incredible teachers out there who can show another student how to code in Python or the right way to write commands or any of those things. Sometimes some of these softer skills are a lot harder for someone to transfer that learning onto someone else. If I were to ask you, "Andrew, how do you teach someone to be creative?" I think that's a little bit of a harder question to perhaps answer. And so I think that's a lot of times of what they mean by that.

But as one specific anecdotal example, I remember when I was in fifth grade. My parents came to my parent-teacher conference, talked to my teacher, teacher had great things to say. One of the things she mentioned though in the feedback was, "Look, Al's doing a great job. But a couple things we noticed are that he often uses a lot of filler words when he speaks and he looks down when he speaks and presents in front of class." So because my parents wanted me to get better and wanted me to improve, for the next month, every day before school, my dad would sit me down and he would make me present something in front of him.

And Andrew, it was painful, but I can tell you now is that I host three podcasts. I get up on stage and talk in front of hundreds if not thousands of people. People do have the capacity to grow partially because everyone starts with similar. Everyone has some level of communication, some level of creativity, some level of problem solving.

Andrew: No, I think that's a really great point. And I guess to get into the topic at hand, when it comes to job searching, why are soft skills so important not just to the job that you hope to get, but also through the process? Because I think soft skills are one of the biggest advantages during the job search process if you could really prove yourself during the hiring process because it's like, the soft skills can help you get the job, and you could also use that as an opportunity to say, hey, when I'm in this job, I can use these skills too.

Al: It's a great point. I think they matter because all work requires working with humans, and humans naturally sometimes make things complex. And what soft skills when you use them do is they help you sort through that complexity. And so being able to demonstrate how you can use those is going to make you stand out and also differentiate you amongst a crowd. A lot of people may be applying to a job and a lot of people may have the technical skills to do it, but how do you handle those moments when things don't go necessarily as planned? That is where you have the ability to differentiate.

And also going through the job search process. Every interaction is an opportunity to demonstrate those soft skills, those soft skills that you're putting on your resume, that you're going to be talking about in the interview anyway. Every single touchpoint is your chance to demonstrate that you have the ability to work well with others.

Andrew: We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, Al talks about best practices and ways to improve soft skills in the workplace.

Andrew: And we're back talking about letting your human skills shine during your job search with Al Dea. So we've already gone through why soft skills are important in the workplace, but how do we figure out what we need to improve on, and what are the steps that we can take towards that goal?

How do you take inventory of your soft skills and then how do you know what you need to improve upon?

Al: I think that professional athletes have a leg up on us when it comes to this. And what I mean by that is one of the things they do very well is they study the tape. They will look at their tape and look to see what they did well, how they could improve their technique, how they could have done something differently. They look at their body of work and they start to break down and see where they're strong and where they're weakened, and to make observations. So one specific thing we can do is if we all ask ourselves to look back over the past three to six months and to identify a project or task or work stream that we completed successfully, and to actually map out to understand what did we do and what was the impact of what we made, and then as a subset of that, what skills did we actually use to actually do that thing?

So the very first thing that you can do is actually just to have that mapping experience where you take something, evaluate it, and break it down. I think the other thing that you can do is that you can ask for feedback. Some of that feedback will come from yourself, and some of that feedback will come from another person.

But let's say for example, you want to improve your ability to communicate succinctly with groups of people. You've identified that as a skill. Every time you have an opportunity to practice that, you can do two things. One, at the end of it, you can do a self-assessment. So you can say, "Okay, how do I think I did there?" Let's just say it's a scale of one to five, and this time it was a three. Well, what that does is that it gives you an anchoring of what a three could be, and then the next time you do it, you can ask yourself the same question and say, "Okay, well this time, how did I do? Oh, you know what? I did a little bit better. That's a four." And then the last thing you can do certainly is get feedback, whether it's a peer, whether it's a mentor, whether it's a manager.

And so I think a combination of those things can start as a good baseline. It's just a better understanding and paying more attention, observing how we do the work that we do.

Andrew: One of the things that I always tell people, and this is if you are a job seeker, if you are maybe looking for a job and you currently have one, or maybe you're looking for a job and you were laid off, one of the best things to do, I always think, is to go to your coworkers or your former coworkers, and like you said, just ask, "What am I good at and what do I need to work on?" And I guess the next question would be, if you find out, okay, you're not good when it comes to one-on-one meetings, and I know that's the part that I struggled with in the past. I was super uncomfortable. I'd get anxious. So I had to work at it. How do you go about improving on that skill or improving on that aspect of yourself?

Al: The best way to improve upon it is to actually put it into practice, to be able to observe it, to evaluate how you did, and then to get another rep. It is almost like a little bit of a loop, if you will, of being able to identify something that you want to practice. And I think the first step to that is to really actually just call it out for what it is and to say, "This is an area, one-on-one meetings, where I'm not as great as I want to be in, but I would like to be better." And whether it's with, again, a peer, your own direct manager, if you're working to say, "Hey, here's where I want to get better. I want to see if you can observe me and also perhaps even give me feedback to see how I'm doing. And in some cases, perhaps even recommend if you would like any further training or some coaching around it, some additional types of things."

And I think the things that kind of stand out in that process, though, are being focused on certain things and then being able to go out, practice it, and getting specific feedback on, well, here's what you can improve.

I think the other thing with a job search, I think also to keep in mind is to think about, not only just what soft skills you want to improve, but for the potential roles that you want, what are the type of soft skills that they're looking for? And perhaps even using that as a way to anchor the development of potential soft skills that you think you might need. Because if you do have a sense of that specific role that you want, getting a better understanding of those soft skills can also help you laser in and focus on your own development plan.

Andrew: I think sometimes people feel like they're being taken for a ride during the hiring process because they're sort of shuffled between interviews. Other people control the schedule, not necessarily themselves. So how do you make sure that you're actually exemplifying your soft skills that will make a difference?

Al: I think a really tactical way to do it is to start either with the job description or perhaps if you are in a place where you can get a better understanding of what they're looking for in an applicant, either because you've done informational interviewing or because you've had informal conversations. Once you get a sense of the types of soft skills for that specific job that are either in the job description or that they want to see, you can start by thinking about, in my interactions, how do I make sure that I'm modeling these? What are some tactical things I can do or say or use in my written communications, in my verbal communications, and how I engage with others, throughout this process?

You can also think about how you might be able to incorporate them when you're actually talking in the interview, when they ask you specific questions. If they don't actually explicitly ask you about those specific soft skills, you can find a way to weave them into the stories that you use when they ask certain questions.

And then certainly, again, modeling them in your interactions. I mean, people still hire people. And the reality of that, or what I think that means, particularly for soft skills is that, every interaction you have with someone in the process is your chance to demonstrate your ability to engage, communicate, and work well with others. What are the types of things you can demonstrate that show that you are someone who would work really well with others and be able to really succeed in this job? And that can be related to how you communicate. That can be how you demonstrate and show empathy. That can mean demonstrating you're a self-starter or demonstrating your prompt by following up afterward with a great thank you email. I think there are so many opportunities at various points to really demonstrate those and for the real go-getters to really map out what that interview process looks like and all those touch points and think about, "Okay, what are some opportunities where I could really demonstrate my best self in these moments?"

Andrew: Definitely. And something that I always tell people too, is when they get their annual reviews or mid-year reviews, to print them out and save those, because a lot of times, that's where you'll get a quote from a manager or some superior that will say, "They're a great communicator, or they lead meetings efficiently and they listen to their colleagues." Those are usually where you'll find all of that information. And when you're writing your resume, obviously you could say, "I managed a team of 12," but if you followed that up with, "My supervisor said," and make a little quote that basically pulls from your review, then you have the endorsement of this soft skill from my superior at my previous employer or my current employer. So I always suggest, always save your reviews, because that's a lot of times where you'll get praise for the soft skills.

Al: Yeah. That is such a great point, and I think it kind of aligns with something I was saying earlier about just paying more attention to our own game tape of how we work. Similarly to the athletes. Your performance reviews are a great example of game tape to start with and to really showcase where you're doing well and really to help you think about, what are the things that people are already telling me I'm really good at? And perhaps, how might I be able to bring those to life in an interview or in the interactions I have throughout that job search?

Andrew: And I think if you have a good manager, they will give you constructive criticism as often as they give you praise. We're not all good at everything, so if you just get sort of a thumbs up and say, "Hey, keep doing great," that's fantastic, but I know that I always have things to work on. Having that feedback is one of those places where you can always say, "Okay, well this is where I could push myself a little bit because other people are noticing it."

Al: Absolutely. I'm a big believer in constructive feedback, and I know just from my own experience and looking at some of the literature out there, it is a lot easier to improve a strength than sometimes it is to improve a weakness. But I also do think, going back to what you're bringing up and looking at that positive and constructive feedback, that can also be an indicator, for you of this next job, what do you want to lean into because you're exceptionally good at it or because you love doing it. And I think it's just a good treasure trove of information that can lead to better insights about how you choose your next job.

Andrew: I think what you said is so important because just because someone says, "Oh, you're a natural at this, or you're a natural at that," you can still use those skills, but it doesn't mean that you have to do it in some sort of prescribed way.

Al: Yeah, absolutely. That's such a great point. And I think just the other thing really is just to make sure you do your homework. Use what you see or what's available to you, whether it's the job description or just from informational interviews as a starting place, at least, to really get some ideas and inspiration for how to best model those soft skills in the search.

Andrew: Such an important point. And obviously we'll be talking a little bit more about this next week, so I'm looking forward to that conversation.

Al: Likewise.

Andrew: Great. Well, thanks so much, Al.

Al: Great. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: That was Al Dea, founder of Better Work Labs.

Remember, it's up to you to put our advice into practice. Still, you always have a community backing you up and cheering you on. Connect with me and the Get Hired community on LinkedIn to continue this conversation. In fact, join Al and me on Get Hired Live on Wednesday, February 22nd at noon Eastern time with your questions. You could find the RSVP link in today's show notes.

Also, if you liked this episode, leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. It helps people like you find the show. And of course, we'll continue this conversation, next week right here, wherever you like to listen.

Get Hired is a production of LinkedIn News. This episode was produced by Alexis Ramdaou, Assaf Gidron engineered our show, Joe DiGiorgi mixed our show. Dave Pond is Head of News Production. Courtney Coupe is head of Original Programming for LinkedIn. Dan Roth is the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. And I'm Andrew Seamen.

Until next time, stay well and best of luck.