3 Tips to Hire for Soft Skills in the Workplace

When hiring a candidate for an open position, it’s easy to turn to their credentials. Does the candidate have the right education? Do their previous roles show they have the right skills for the job? Do their years of experience match what you're looking for? Even if you answered yes to all of these, it’s important to remember candidates are more than the information on their resume. 

A resume might give you a sense of what a candidate is capable of, but it’s just as important to gather a sense of who they are. It’s time to take a step back and take a holistic look at candidates, not just the information presented on a job application.

In fact, more often than not, what differentiates a qualified candidate from a high-quality candidate is their soft skills. These include a mix of character traits, personality traits, and workplace competencies that can greatly influence performance at work. But, if a resume doesn’t provide insights, what’s the best way to evaluate soft skills? 

What Are Soft Skills?

When evaluating candidates for a position, a hiring manager’s goal is to best understand how the candidate will perform according to the requirements of the role. This initial evaluation tends to be based on technical skills or prior experience. However, there’s a lot to be said about performance that can’t always be found on a resume or application.

Soft skills refer to a combination of interpersonal, communication, and social intelligence skills that enable individuals to work well with others, perform their tasks efficiently, and achieve both their goals as well as those of their team.

In a work environment, soft skills are essential for establishing a positive company culture, fostering collaboration, and ensuring effective communication within a team or organization.

In contrast, hard skills are specific, teachable abilities or knowledge sets. Both inform hiring teams how a candidate might approach their work, but identifying soft skills involves moving beyond the resume and getting to know the candidate.

3 Tips for Evaluating Soft Skills

Applicants whose skills don’t meet job requirements are pretty easily removed from the candidate pool, but what of the rest? For those whose applications are pushed further into the hiring process, understanding their soft skills is just as important as their job-related technical skills. Here are a few ways to better understand a candidate’s soft skills and how these skills might translate to their work.

Understanding a Candidate’s Online Presence

As mentioned, a candidate’s resume and application are only an introduction to a candidate’s skills. There’s much more to be uncovered when looking beyond that first touchpoint. One way to dig a bit deeper is to uncover insights fromtake a look at their publicly available online behavior.

In 2023, it was estimated that there were 246 million social media users in the United States and more than 4.95 billion social media users worldwide. With such a high volume of online users, there’s a strong possibility that candidates have a digital footprint. An individual’s online presence can reveal a lot about their character, and it’s these traits, soft skills, and actions that translate into workplace competencies. 

With candidate screening technology, hiring teams can quickly, ethically, and compliantly leverage a candidate’s online presence to better determine how their positive personality traits and skills will translate into both a job role and a corporate culture. More specifically, hiring teams gain insight into personality traits, workplace competencies, and misconduct, all of which wouldn’t be included in a job application. As a result, hiring teams can gain a stronger sense of a candidate’s soft skills and better gauge their potential for success in the workplace. 

Ask The Right Questions

Online screening tools don’t just allow hiring teams to take a closer look at a candidate beyond their application, but they also can help shape the way hiring teams interact with candidates. To understand soft skills, it’s important to ask candidates the right questions – ones that not only reaffirm information presented on a resume but also aim to dig a bit deeper into who they are. 

By asking behavioral interview questions designed to prompt candidates to provide specific examples of past behavior that demonstrate their abilities, interviewers can gain insights into how a candidate has handled tasks and challenges that require soft skills. These questions encourage candidates to describe the context, their actions, and the outcomes. This detailed narrative allows interviewers to assess the candidate's approach to problem-solving, communication, teamwork, and other soft skills.

Investigation Through Observation

Evaluating web presence and creating a list of behavioral interview questions to ask candidates is only part of the battle when it comes to hiring for soft skills. Beyond this, hiring teams need to pay close attention and observe candidates throughout this process.

For instance, one soft skill indicator to be on the lookout for is communication throughout the hiring process. Are candidates consistent with email communication? Are they showing up for interviews on time? Are they professional with their responses and answering all parts of the questions being asked? During interviews, does the candidate’s body language indicate they’re engaged with the conversation?

Additionally, hiring teams, of course, need to consider the actual responses to the behavioral questions being asked. When candidates are highly prepared for interviews, they’re able to give detailed responses that provide insights into how their soft skills translate to their work. For example, when asking a candidate about a time where they had to manage a conflict at a previous job, the quality of their response and the way they convey the story provides hiring teams with more information about their conflict resolution skills and emotional intelligence. 

Together, these factors address the human element of a candidate, rather than the demands of the job itself. And, getting to know candidates as a human being helps hiring teams understand the way they will fit into not only the role, but the community they would be joining. 

5 Soft Skills to Screen For

Screening candidates for soft skills is essential because these skills contribute significantly to not only an individual's success, but also the overall health of the organization. Here are a few soft skills that you should be screening for. 

1. Communication: Communication skills involve the ability to convey information effectively, listen actively, and engage in meaningful dialogues. This includes both verbal and written communication as well as non-verbal cues like body language.
2. Teamwork: With strong teamwork skills, candidates have the ability to work effectively with others towards a common goal. While the ability to work independently is valuable as well, this skill includes collaboration, mutual support, and the ability to work within diverse teams. 
3. Problem-Solving: Problem-solving skills are vital for candidates to succeed in their roles. These skills involve the ability to identify issues, analyze situations, generate potential solutions, and implement effective resolutions. It requires critical thinking, creativity, and the ability to stay calm under pressure. Those who excel in this skill, if hired, can solve problems efficiently, which then helps maintain smooth operations and address issues before they escalate.
4. Adaptability: The ability to adjust to new conditions, learn new skills, and handle unexpected changes with a positive attitude doesn’t always come easily. Candidates who are highly adaptive are open to new ideas and approaches, allowing for their work to continuously evolve and improve as demands change.
5. Emotional Intelligence and Empathy: When discussing soft skills, one of the first things that probably comes to mind is emotional intelligence, which is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one's own emotions and those of others. It includes self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and effective social skills.

‍

Keep in mind that these are only a handful of soft skills to look out for. Every job requires a different set of skills, so every hiring process should be adjusted to look for the soft skills that are most relevant.

How to Use Online Screening Technology to Hire for Soft Skills in the Workplace

Screening a candidate for their qualifications only goes so far when it comes to understanding their skills. To hire the right candidate for the role, it’s critical to consider the candidate for everything they bring to the table. While their application might outline their hard skills, the soft skills are just as important, but not always as clear to understand. 

Earlier, we mentioned how there are millions of social media users in the United States alone. When it comes to the workplace, digital-natives and tech-dependent Millennials and Gen Z are becoming the largest segment of workers – growing from 50% to 75% of the working population over the next 5 years. So, there’s a good and increasing chance that applicants have a social media profile or have at least made public contributions online somewhere, whether that’s a forum, a blog post, or a comment on another person's Instagram post.

It’s these messages that can reveal a lot about a candidate that might not otherwise come up during the hiring process. This is often related to the audience online as many users behave online the way they do in their day to day lives, not how they would show up in an interview. . 

So, it should come as no surprise that a candidate’s public web presence can be a useful source of information when it comes to understanding a candidate for their soft skills and personality traits. While it may sound difficult to find and analyze online content to better understand personality traits and workplace competencies, online candidate screening technology can streamline this process in a way that’s ethical and compliant.

Today’s technology is making it easier to uncover soft skills without requiring extra actions from the candidate. These tools take online content and analyze it for language that may indicate hurtful or discriminatory language that would deem a candidate a bad fit for a role. Additionally, these tools can identify positive personality traits that would support how a candidate might align with business values and goals. 

Fama has developed an online candidate screening tool that does just that. Instant Fit requires only a few sentences of content to create a data-driven analysis of a candidate that identifies their positive personality traits and related workplace competencies. This tool also uses this data to generate interview questions that are uniquely tailored to each candidate in order to help hiring teams further evaluate candidates for their soft skills during the hiring process. 

Ultimately, advanced online screening tools help hiring teams ensure that candidates who are qualified according to their hard skills are also qualified for their soft skills, making for a more holistic approach to hiring. To get started with these tools, reach out to Fama today and book a demo!