Soft Skills are Too Important to Be Called Soft

The Hiring Formula for Success shown in the image above defines all of the factors that best predict on-the-job success. Soft skills top the list.

CAUTION: being affable, extroverted and prepared are terrible predictors of effective soft skills! It’s worse if the candidate starts asking questions since you’re being seduced. You’ll be able to get evidence of strong soft skills using the interviewing tips described below.

10 Interviewing Tips for Accurately Assessing Soft Skills

1. Understanding the Hiring Formula for Success?will enable you to determine how a person’s soft skills impact their performance.?
2. Soft skills are too important to be called soft.?This post defines soft skills?and their role in leveraging a person’s hard skills.?
3. Controlling bias is the key to accurately assessing soft skills. Too many hiring managers use inappropriate techniques to assess non-technical skills.?This post will set them straight.
4. You can’t push on a string?and other interviewing techniques for better understanding how to be strong at using soft skills.?
5. A short story?about a short two-hour program on how to assess soft skills to a bunch of LinkedIn engineers.?
6. This short intro to the Performance-based Interview?will enable anyone to better assess soft skills than 90% of the people who are responsible for assessing soft skills.
7. Use the fact-finding probes?shown below when asking about a candidate’s major team accomplishments to understand how the person’s soft skills influenced the results.
8. Soft skills are a critical component of the?Quality of Hire Talent Scorecard. Part of ranking high on soft skills is anticipating and avoiding team problems and collaborating successfully on cross-functional projects.?
9. Once you’ve reviewed the above?check out our entire library of articles and ideas on assessing soft skills?including how they’re defined when opening up the job requisition.?
10. As part of our?Performance-based Hiring workshop recruiters and hiring managers?will work on a case study search project together. As part of this they’ll learn how to assess soft skills using all of these techniques.?

It turns out that people are hired based on the depth of their hard skills, but typically underperform due to their lack of soft skills. These tips will enable you to avoid this critical interviewing problem.

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Lou Adler?is the CEO and founder of?Performance-based Hiring Learning Systems?– a consulting and training firm helping recruiters and hiring managers around the world hire more leaders. Lou is the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller,?Hire With Your Head?(John Wiley & Sons, 4th Edition, 2021),?The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired?(Workbench Media, 2013) and LinkedIn Learning’s?Performance-based Hiring?video training program (2016). Make sure you check out his?Hire with Your Head?Virtual Book Club?for the latest hiring ideas and trends.