Soft skills and recruitment: increasing your sourcing performance tenfold is possible thanks to soft skills. Indeed, analysing the soft skills of candidates, that is to say their behavioural skills, makes it possible to optimise your recruitment process and the candidate selection phase.
Sourcing is a process to find and identify the profiles that best match the position, the team and the corporate culture. Today, recruiting the right person, rather than the right CV, is essential to guarantee a new employee’s integration and to avoid turnover.
Digital sourcing, an essential part of recruitment
What is sourcing?
Within recruitment, digital sourcing relies on the use of digital tools to optimise the process of identiftying profiles during the selection phase. Human resources professionals are increasingly using social networks or job boards to identify and recruit talent that best matches the criteria and values sought by their company.
In practice, this 2.0 selection is based on search criteria previously defined by the company for recruitment (keywords, search filters, etc.). Thus, in just a few clicks HR professional can narrow the talent pool to their specific recruitment expectations.
Assessing soft skills during recruitment
The use of psychometric tests or personality tests is extremely useful during different phases of recruitment. These tests analyse your candidate’s soft skills, motivations and cognitive abilities. Their results make it possible to anticipate the match between the candidate and a particular position, as well as their integration into the team and overall company culture.
Using these tests to analyse soft skills is all the more relevant when we know that the vast majority of recruitment failures are due specifically to the mismatch between the recruits behaviours and the company values, or those of their team. Soft skills, which refer to these behavioural skills and therefore the human qualities of an individual, guarantee the integration of the newcomer into their new working environment.
Soft skills and recruitment: increasing sourcing performance
The importance of soft skills in recruitment
Soft skills have been popular within recruitment processes for several years now because they complement the information that previously was the main focus of recruiters: hard skills.
Soft skills refer to decisive skills in the integration and adaptation of the employee to their position, to the corporate culture and to their team. These important indicators include, among other things, creativity, empathy, organisation, ability to collaborate and adapt, open-mindedness, interpersonal skills, leadership and emotional intelligence.
Soft skills assessment tools therefore make it possible to optimise your recruitment process, increase sourcing performance, and reduce the risk of turnover.
Essential soft skills
Assessing each candidate’s soft skills during recruitment helps to guarantee their integration into the company and the sustainability of their motivation. Because once a candidate’s behavioural skills have been identified, the recruiter can properly analyse their potentiel and select who will best correspond to the position in question.
Top 8 soft skills for 2025
The World Economic Forum has identified the top soft skills they recommend to develop between now and 2025:
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation
