How to Develop Your Soft Skills to Stand Out

Developing your soft skills—the secret to standing out? Indeed, recruiters are increasingly interested in candidates' behavioral competencies. Analyzing a candidate's soft skills helps reduce the risk of turnover by verifying the alignment between their values and those of the company. When technical skills are equal, soft skills help differentiate two profiles to find the one who will best adapt to their professional environment. So how can you develop your soft skills to stand out to recruiters?

Identify Your Strengths to Showcase Yourself

Get to Know Yourself to Develop Your Soft Skills

To stand out, it is essential to know your strengths and the behavioral competencies you already possess. Indeed, developing your soft skills is a significant lever for employability and attractiveness. To do this, candidates must be able to identify them. Introspective work is necessary for employees to become aware of their qualities and successfully transpose them into the professional world. Because to stand out and successfully showcase yourself, you need to build confidence and develop self-assurance. To develop your behavioral competencies, you can also turn to the personality test. This effective solution offers candidates a pleasant experience through which they will learn to know themselves better.

The Personality Test: An Essential Tool

A gamified, flexible personality test (mobile learning, multi-session completion), offering automatic feedback, personalized advice, and social media sharing options transforms the assessment into a rich and motivating experience. Shape evaluates 20 personality traits and identifies the potential of 15 key behaviors (thinking, acting, cooperating, influencing...). Each personality trait integrated into the Shape data collection module was selected to optimize the prediction of behaviors and performance in a professional context. They are distributed across five groups: leadership influence, consideration of others, creativity-adaptability, rigor at work, and personal balance. With these results, you get a comprehensive view of your soft skills and the competencies you still need to develop.

Know Which Soft Skills to Develop to Stand Out

Become Aware of Your Areas for Improvement

Being aware of your areas for improvement is essential to continue progressing and developing your behavioral competencies. That's why knowing which soft skills to develop is crucial. Using a personality test will indicate your areas for improvement. Additionally, during a personality test, you benefit from personalized advice and automatic feedback that help you progress and stand out. Thanks to the Shape test, candidates can identify their soft skills to improve and pinpoint eight counterproductive behavioral tendencies. Among these eight areas of vigilance, we find lack of self-confidence, intolerance of uncertainty, tendency toward authoritarianism, detachment, procrastination, tendency to worry, impulsivity, and hypersensitivity.

Soft Skills to Develop to Stand Out

To stand out, try to find out which soft skills are most sought after by recruiters. Research the position to be filled, the recruiter's expectations, and the company culture values. This way, you'll know which soft skills to prioritize! According to the World Economic Forum report, the 10 key soft skills to develop by 2025 are:

• Problem-solving ability
• Critical thinking
• Creativity
• Autonomy and initiative
• Management
• Collective intelligence
• Emotional intelligence
• Negotiation skills
• Adaptability
• Effective time management

While some soft skills are difficult to develop, others can be acquired over time and with experience. The most important thing: become aware of your strengths and areas for improvement so you can work on them.