The Importance of Soft Skills to Employers in the 21st Century

When employers go through piles of resumes, it’s fair to say that soft skills are not the first thing they look at. There’s a reason for this – statements to the effect that “I am a great negotiator and exceptional at listening” are almost impossible to back up on paper.

However, these soft skills are increasingly being recognized as essential to employees with the potential to advance within the modern workplace. When you have two candidates with the same hard skills – master’s degrees, certifications, and software expertise – it makes sense to prioritise those with better interpersonal skills.

Though candidates may stress these skills more and more in resumes, they can only be evidenced or proven in person, either through an interview or in practice.

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The Evidence for the Value of Soft Skills

Here’s just some of the evidence base for these often-overlooked skills:

A study by researchers at Harvard University, Boston College and Michigan Ross found that workers at a global clothing exporter who had received training in soft skills were 12% more productive than those who had not.

A LinkedIn survey (2019 Global Talent Trends) discovered that 92% of HR professionals considered soft skills as equally or more important than hard skills.

A McKinsey study found that 80% of C-suite executives considered soft skills a major priority.

Harvard Business Review ran a study of 5000 C-Suite level resumes from 2010-2016, in partnership with executive search firm Russell Reynolds. What they discovered was surprising – by 2016, candidates were no longer emphasizing financial or managerial skills. In fact, as HBR reports, “when companies today search for top leaders, especially new CEOs, they attribute less importance to those capabilities than they used to and instead prioritize one qualification above all others: strong social skills.”

The reasons are not hard to discern. Where employers face a pool of potential candidates with equal and provable hard skills, why wouldn’t they prefer those who would be better team players, communicators, decision-makers, and empathetic managers?

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What Exactly are Soft Skills?

First of all, the name doesn’t resonate with many talent managers, who prefer the term, Power Skills. That terminology at least recognizes the value inherent in these interpersonal and organizational abilities.

Here’s a short list of the power skills that employers are looking for:

• Conflict Resolution
• Decision Making
• Aural and Written Communication
• Empathic Leadership
• Critical Thinking
• Networking and Deal Making
• Problem-Solving

One immediately apparent factor is how difficult these qualities are to demonstrate in a resume. This is why interviewees often get asked hypothetical questions or queries requiring the candidate to tell a personal work anecdote.

Such questions might include:

• “Tell us about a time you faced a workplace conflict, and how did you resolve it?”
• “What do you think are the main attributes of a team player?”
• “Explore a major problem you faced, and how you went about solving it.”

These are open questions, requiring more than a yes or no response. They are often the questions that an employee dreads because the answers to such questions are rarely concrete or obvious. The employer is trying to dig deep into a candidate’s interpersonal or problem-solving skills. These questions are inherently difficult to prepare for, yet vital.

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Why are Soft Skills on the Rise?

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of change in hybrid and remote working, creating new challenges for businesses. Talking to Arabian Business, Jon Ede, regional director of Michael Page Middle East, said “leaders have needed to keep a keen eye on staff wellbeing, whilst ensuring that communication and collaboration evolve in line with a switch to blended ways of working.”

With fewer face-to-face interactions, soft skills are stretched to breaking point, exacerbating the need to find truly excellent candidates who can manage remote teams, collaborate at a distance, effectively manage time, and problem-solve in a distributed workplace.

In recent years, there has been a growing literature on soft upskilling, together with training courses, books, online programs, and articles emphasizing its importance. It’s now more acceptable to prioritize such abilities, whereas in the more brutal, less wellbeing-centred 20th century, options of “empathy” and “conflict resolution” may have seemed too fuzzy and soft, to take seriously.

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How can Soft Skills be Improved?

If we accept the premise that these skills are vital in the 21st-century workplace, how can we ensure our employees exemplify them?

Firstly, workers can be encouraged to focus upon:

• Listening, rather than reacting
• Leading by example
• Concentrating on strengthening relationships
• Fostering collaboration over competition
• Being open to feedback, and making changes
• Volunteering for team leadership
• Patiently working through conflict

By taking an empathic approach to tasks, problems and conflicts, leaders and workers can strengthen their soft skills. Rather like developing muscles through frequent use, soft skills must be practised, rather than learned by rote.