Recruitment: Why You Should Go All In on Soft Skills

Soft skills place people back at the heart of the company's recruitment strategy. Faced with the digitization of processes, it can be reassuring to focus more on candidates' technical knowledge and professional experience. Yet many soft skills contribute to the notion of performance by enriching the company's human capital. Soft skills strengthen the internal cohesion of teams to better meet the company's objectives. It is therefore essential to integrate them into the "candidate persona" as well as into recruitment criteria.

Soft Skills to Overcome Future Changes

Why do recruiters praise soft skills? These behavioral competencies represent for employers a guarantee of adaptation in the face of the company's increasingly uncertain and competitive external environment. On one hand, job-specific knowledge has a much shorter lifespan due to the acceleration of technological progress, which increases task obsolescence. Technical skills, weakened by this rapid pace, need to be regularly updated. Today, although we know that lifelong learning is possible, one still needs the soft skills that facilitate upskilling. For example, open-mindedness and flexibility allow people to move beyond a fixed vision of their profession and acquire new capabilities. When recruiting for a position heavily impacted by business transformation, it will be essential to identify these qualities. On the other hand, with the rise of "project" mode, it is important to surround yourself with competencies and talents that match an increasingly agile way of working. In this approach, shifting management style toward a more cross-functional mode can avoid the need to bring in external consultants. This approach certainly reduces costs, but immerses employees and human resources at the heart of business transformation. Soft skills therefore play a role in the company's development and operations. Before a recruitment operation, HR must have a precise and technical understanding of the business and the roles that compose it in order to create a strong team capable of adapting to upcoming changes.

Recruitment Drives Business Transformation

Clarifying the soft skills sought and integrating them into the candidate profile ensures a match between all the new hire's competencies and the company's business objectives. The WEF (World Economic Forum) lists 10 soft skills to keep on your radar during recruitment phases. As you can see, it's up to you to select the soft skills that best suit your situation. What behavioral competencies are needed to overcome your challenges? What relational difficulties do your employees experience on a daily basis? What soft skills can you bring in to improve the efficiency of a work process? Complex problem-solving combined with creativity helps untangle difficult work situations. Managers with these soft skills know how to work around obstacles with new solutions. They can also pass these qualities on to their teams, who will need to demonstrate cognitive flexibility. An obvious asset in project mode, a sense of collaboration brings fluidity and efficiency to missions involving multiple stakeholders from different backgrounds. Decision-making ability and negotiation also come into play in a world of work where positions are evolving rapidly. An employee may find themselves leading a project due to their expertise, but will also need to possess soft skills related to leadership, for example. Communicating, working in teams, and solving problems are competencies that cannot be delegated to machines, unlike many technical skills. In a context where business transformation is disrupting the career paths of most employees, soft skills provide an advantage to the talents who possess them and to the companies that employ them. Be careful though—recruiting for soft skills alone is not enough; you must also open up their acquisition to existing employees. What if you started with a personality test? There is no inevitability—soft skills can be learned and developed, especially if employees see their value! Recruitment should showcase soft skills, but it cannot be solely responsible for enhancing human capital. In business transformation, developing soft skills internally is equally essential to the company's long-term economic sustainability.