Why Soft Skills Matter in Today's Workforce

Today’s employers are looking for employees with soft skills like empathy, listening and critical thinking. The problem is, they are having a hard time finding them.

 When you look for team members with both hard and soft skills, you set your business up for success and growth.

 Let’s look at why soft skills matter in today’s workforce and how to find them.

The Most Sought After Soft Skills

The most-often-looked-for soft skills deal with communication, social, and people skills. A team that can work well together has complementary soft and hard skills.

Here are a few important soft skills to look for:

•    Listening skills
•     Speaking skills
•     Teamwork
•     Leadership
•     Communication
•     Decision making
•     Time management
•     Attitude
•     Conflict Resolution
•     Empathy
•     Problem solving

 Why Soft Skills are Important

Consider your best employees. They usually have a great work ethic and super interpersonal skills. These are the soft skills.

It can be hard for businesses to help their staff develop these skills because these are generally learned behaviors over many years. This is why it’s important to actively look for soft skills. You can look for them in the interview and in the reference checking phase.

These soft skills are important because they are the driving force behind your successful team. Soft skills contribute to your employees’ overall success and ultimately to your success as a vital business.

 Employees with exceptional soft skills are better at empathizing with customer and fellow employees. They can handle constructive criticism and show the drive to correct problems.

 Soft skills contribute to an employee’s ability to regulate their actions and their words. They enable your employee to face obstacles and overcome them.

 So, you can see why soft skills really matter in today’s workforce.

 Today’s successful teams have the appropriate hard skills, but they also have the relationship-building skills to communicate and work together as a team towards an overall goal.

 How to Assess Soft Skills

During the interview process, you can tailor some of your questions to identify the important soft skills.

 Consider asking your candidates questions like, “How would you handle x situation?” Or you could ask them what they think about something pertinent.

 Questions to concentrate on to gauge a candidate’s soft skills include:

•    Learning how they see the employee/supervisor relationship.
•    Uncovering how they handled conflict at their last job.
•     Finding out how they solved a challenging problem and overcame it.
•     Asking how they dealt with a difficult team member.
•     Learning how they handled asking someone for help.
•    Gauging how they like to communicate.
•     Finding out how they handled criticism and critique from their last supervisor.

 You can come right out and ask your candidates what soft skills they possess and how they might help them with your open job.

In addition, have someone else in the interview with you to take all of this into account. Since they aren’t asking the questions, they can have time to observe the candidate’s communication skills and answers. 

To Conclude

In a nutshell, soft skills can be summed up as emotional intelligence. This is a person’s ability to express their emotions and handle interpersonal relationships with care and empathy. It’s your employee’s ability to not only be aware of and express their emotions, but also to control them.

 You’ll find that putting together a team with soft skills as well as hard skills will help your team gel better together.

 Interpersonal communication skills are vital to teamwork. They are also important when it comes to providing feedback as well as building connections among staff and customers.

 Consider making the investment in a team of employees with excellent soft skills because they matter in today’s workforce.