Soft skills that managers look for in software engineers during an interview

Nowadays, interviewers assess a person based on technical knowledge and their soft skills. For validating soft skills, usually, interviewers ask real-life scenarios and how the candidate dealt with it. The inclusion of soft skills-based questions in interviews marks the importance of it in corporate life.

What are soft skills?

Undoubtedly, for a successful career, a person should possess immense technical knowledge. Additionally, they should also have assertiveness, innovation, creativity, confidence, and excellent communication skills to express themselves diligently. The perfect mix of technical and soft skills helps a software engineer to flourish and grow in their career. In an interview, the interviewer is interested in ‘how’ you found the solution. Because this helps them in noticing your inherent soft skills. Therefore, they are often not looking for the result you achieve, but they want to know ‘how’ you achieved it.   

Now, let us explore the top soft skills and associated interview questions that interviewers are likely to ask. 

1. Adaptive 

Employers want their employees to be adaptive to changes, environment, and technical skills.

In software development, employees need to re-skill and upskill themselves. If a person is resistant to changes they may not be ready to learn new things.

Flexibility, learning capacity, and problem-solving are required traits of an adaptive employee.

Let’s have a look at the adaptive soft skills related interview questions: 

• Tell me a situation where you had to work on a task which was out of your role and responsibility 
• Tell me a situation where you had to adapt yourself to new software in the project quickly?

What hiring managers listen to: 

• The interviewer is looking for adjustment in activities and approach if there are changes of any type in the project – team, deadline, software, tasks, etc.  
• How quickly you adapt and make positive changes in your attitude is the key to answer these questions.

2. Inquisitive 

It is a tendency to be intellectually curious, to know, and to learn new things.

In the software industry, every other day technology evolves. Therefore all software professionals need to keep up-to-date with the latest technology in the market.

An inquisitive person will learn new technology out of his curiosity and thus will learn better. Also, it is a mindset of wanting to find out more on the information of a project/specifications before getting started. So that a clearer high-level picture is formed before starting the actual project.

Leaders are naturally inquisitive, so that they know more and stay ahead of everyone.

Let us look at inquisitiveness related interview questions: 

• What is your learning style and how often you practice it? 
• What do you do in your free time outside office hours?

What hiring managers listen to:

The interviewer is looking for positive traits- observation, curiosity, learning, passion for various subjects. 

3. Creative thinking 

A creative mind is a flexible mind, which adapts to the changes in requirements pretty quickly. Their creativity helps in developing technical solutions promptly. Such skills are important especially when a development team faces a challenge perhaps due to system architecture. This person will then be able to quickly come out with a ‘workaround’ solution so that the team can proceed with development.

Let’s have a look at creative thinking related interview questions: 

• How will you react when your team member has suggested an idea which is unorthodox but effective. 
• Do you discuss with your teammates the new ways of doing project tasks? Give me an example.
• Tell me a situation when you applied creative thinking to an already existing official process to make it better. 

 What hiring managers listen to: 

• They ask about situations about your ability to apply creativity to find solutions to daily activities or complex issues.  
• Creativity leads to innovation and that’s why they are looking out for it.

If you want to learn more about other soft skills and what questions might be asked, head over to our blog and read more.