For long, recruiters have understated the importance of human skills while navigating through candidates and recruiting for jobs

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In a professional world of cut-throat competition and strictly performance-based assessments, soft skills might appear to be an understated requirement. However, one cannot do without them. A candidate might be a programmer, an engineer, a writer or a salesperson, but he/she is first a human being with an emotional quotient. Human skills are technically not considered a part of professional talent, yet even the best professional talent is futile without essential soft skills. You might be the best developer in your organization, but if you are insincere, unable to communicate well with your team, lack the ability to collaborate and fail to maintain a good equation with your clients, your technical ability or hard skills is going to get you only so far. 

For long, recruiters have understated the importance of human skills while navigating through candidates and recruiting for jobs. However, this approach is gradually changing for good. Increasingly, organizations are realizing that without the necessary human skills, professional talent too, has its limitations. If an employee lacks technical skills, training and experience can help improve it. However, when it comes to attitude and aptitude, these are soft skills that cannot be taught or ingrained.

Why soft skills matter?

Let’s answer this with a question. Between two employees who are equally good at their work, which one will you choose to service a client? The one who is approachable, doesn’t lose patience easily, communicates seamlessly and greets everyone with a smile or the one who often turns irritable, is inflexible and uncongenial with team members? 

It is not difficult to understand why soft skills are as or even more important than hard skills when it comes to having a sustainable work environment. Soft skills include a series of personality traits that enable an individual to better navigate his/her environment and handle difficult situations with grace. These human traits include social and communication skills, sincerity towards commitment, emotional intelligence, negotiation, conflict resolution as well as people to people skills. Empathy, patience, flexibility, tolerance and an ability to communicate in difficult situations without arousing tempers are a bunch of very important skill sets. Soft skills also include an ability to work upon oneself with endurance and constantly upgrade your capacity. 

As social animals, human beings spend a large part of their lives navigating through people. This is why the ability to get along with people is one of the most important factors that determine the amenability of an individual or an employee. While your hard skills will help you get a job and establish yourself, but as you move up the professional ladder you will have to muster more and more of your human skills to run efficient teams.

Can soft skills be quantified?

However, it is difficult to quantify or judge soft skills in an individual at the time of recruiting. There are hardly any tests to judge skills such as communication, anger management or even sincerity. However, if you accord the due importance to soft skills, there are subtle ways in which you can assess the candidate during the entire process of recruitment. This includes keeping a close eye on the way the individual communicates, the sincerity and maturity he/she displays throughout the process, the passion and eagerness they display towards the job. If a candidate takes more than a week in responding to your requirement of submitting some documents, you get gauge a lackadaisical attitude behind it. Also important is to watch for the written communication with the candidate that gives a fair idea about the maturity of expression and sensibility of thought of the individual.

I am no fan of the quantification of human emotions. However, I do want to find innovative ways to rate the existence of these emotions in a recruitment setting. As a recruiter, I do not want to be flooded with resumes from a job board like Naukri.com listing non-human or mechanical skills like years of experience, this degree, that course. In fact, I don’t even want to look at thousands of Linked-in profiles for shortlisting people. What I am looking for are the people who are actively searching for jobs in the job position offered and are able to show some passion for it. This is why at Youth4Work, we have tried to design innovative Talent Boards that display lists more than just the technical skills of an individual. Our algorithms do not just rank candidate profiles based on a series of technical skill tests but also try to extract exceptional insights into a candidate’s skills, attitude, pro-activeness, and sincerity by analyzing the smart data behind the candidate’s activity on the algorithm. Combining the human element with data creates a smart data pool of talent that is much more representative of a candidate’s skill set than a simple resume is.

As there arises a greater shift in organizational attitudes towards analyzing soft skills during recruitment, we will witness a greater proliferation of similar algorithms and psychometric tests that lay equal value on quantifying soft skills and aptitude. We will also have more organizations investing in building soft skills among their employees through psychological skill training and team building activities.  

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house