Is your lack of soft skills holding you back?

Getting the job of your dreams and excelling in your career has less to do with your technical experience and more to do with your soft skills. Exceptional candidates and employees have a great combination of soft skills and technical skills. This fact is sometimes shocking to people early in their careers because the college experience focuses purely on academics. I have seen many coaching clients, colleagues, and even myself, faced with disappointment about not getting their dream job or feeling their career stalling, due to an imbalance of technical and soft skills. 

What are soft skills? There are many definitions of soft skills, but I would describe them as interpersonal skills such as grit, leadership, and resilience. Soft skills are life skills, and we all develop them throughout our lives. Soft skills are the skills you learn from doing and experiencing life. Technical skills are what you learn from a book on a particular subject. 

Technical experience makes you qualified to perform the role, but your soft skills show you can add value to the part aside from just accomplishing the day to day tasks. Hiring managers want to work with people who can communicate issues, solve problems, and work with others. I have coached many people who excel at the technical part of the work, but often get overlooked for interviews, stretch assignments, and leadership roles because they lack soft skills. 

Below are four ways to elevate your soft skills on your resume, and in your interview, that can take you from a qualified candidate to an ideal candidate. 

You are reliable 

Hiring managers want to hire candidates who will be reliable and get the job done at all costs. Solely showcasing your technical experience will not convince a hiring manager of your reliability. When writing your resume and preparing your interviews, use examples of situations in which you had to step in and execute on a task that wasn't initially assigned to you to ensure the project's success. If you don't have that kind of work experience, consider talking about the time you were in a volunteer organization, and you demonstrated reliability. Using all of your expertise to showcase your skills is fair game. I remind my clients of this when they can't think of past work experiences when they've used their soft skills. No rule says the knowledge you gained outside the workplace doesn't count as experience. 

You work well with others 

Commonly overlooked skills I see missing on the resumes and in interview preparation for my coaching clients are communication and negotiation skills. These skills are critical to moving projects forward. Almost every function of work has some dependency on another person. Skills like communication and negotiation are crucial to relationship building, which helps with meeting deadlines. For example, I had a coaching client who was going to miss a deadline because she needed information from someone on another team in a different department. She had difficulty getting the material because the person she was emailing wasn't responding. My client felt disrespected due to the lack of response. I suggested that she change how she communicated and show more empathy. She took my advice and was able to obtain the information she needed before the deadline. Spend time thinking of how you've added value working well with people to move projects forward to include on your resume and interview preparation. 

Demonstrate you can self-manage

Hiring managers are looking for candidates who can come in and hit the ground running. In today's work environment, there isn't a lot of runway for new employees to ease their way into the role. When you are developing your resume and preparing for interviews, highlighting your past experiences as a problem-solver demonstrates that you can manage yourself. Hiring managers have a ton of responsibilities throughout their day, and they want to have confidence that you can be left alone to get the job done and call on them when you're stuck. Another tremendous soft skill for managing self is time management. Showcasing your time management abilities on your resume and your interview will show the hiring managers that you can manage your time to complete project goals. 

You can perform under pressure

Most of my coaching clients have struggled to show they can gracefully handle being in high-pressure situations. Using examples of how you can quickly adapt to change and manage competing priorities is a top way to showcase this on your resume and in your interviews. Demonstrating you can excel in high pressured situations gives hiring managers assurance that you will come into the role and manage through overwhelming situations. Great examples of this are times in your career where deadlines are tight, and you lose a team member. Describing your thought process on how you performed in this situation will put you in the running to be the ideal candidate in the hiring manager's eyes.  

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