What are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are any skill or quality that can be classified as a personality trait or attribute.
These behaviours shape how you work on your own and with others, and guide your approach to life and work.
Soft skills are any skill or quality that can be classified as a personality trait or attribute.
These behaviours shape how you work on your own and with others, and guide your approach to life and work.
Soft skills are far more indicative of future job performance compared to hard skills. Therefore it's vitally important to be able to assess them accurately.
Using a formalised and psychometrically valid method of soft skill assessment is the most effective way to assess your candidates for soft skills.
According to a report on different types of skills in the job market, a large proportion of job postings are dedicated to describing soft skills, and place high value upon them.
However, these are often skills which candidates do not receive additional training or support with once placed in a role.
This results in what we call a ‘skills gap’ where skills are being overemphasised in the recruitment process, but under supplied (or not accurately identified) from the talent pool.
There is a gap between business’ demand for soft skills and their presence in the workforce
The Oxford Economics’ Workforce 2020 study found that “problems with talent and key skills are affecting business performance”
There is also a growing disconnect between the demand for soft skills and the inability to identify them. While everyone agrees soft skills are extremely valuable, most companies still struggle to assess them accurately—and only 41% even have a formal process in place to measure them.
WHY IT PREDICTS PERFORMANCE
Personality drives behaviours such as:
Our interpersonal approach to colleagues & customers
Personality related soft skills link to performance because they determine how we do the job. Hard skills only determine if we can meet the basic functional or technical demands of the job.
The best way to measure and predict personality is through personality questionnaires and structured interviews.
WHY IT PREDICTS PERFORMANCE
People with high general ability are thought to have ‘common sense’. They use this soft skill to decide the best way to do the job.
People at work use reasoning, analysis, problem-solving, and judgmental all of which link to levels of ability.
High levels of hard-skill are no good if an employee does not have enough mental firepower to use it effectively.
The best way to measure mental firepower if through cognitive ability tests.
WHY IT PREDICTS PERFORMANCE
Emotional Intelligence measures how skilled we are at understanding and managing our emotions, and the emotions of those around us.
It is linked to resilience and stress management.
Our emotional skills must be able to help us deal with the emotional demands of the job, or we underperform.
The best way to measure and predict emotional intelligence is through personality questionnaires and structured interviews.
WHY IT PREDICTS PERFORMANCE
These deep seated soft skills determine whether we want to do the job.
We perform well when our values and motivations match the rewards, challenges, and goals in the job.
We perform best when we enjoy the work and feel driven to do well. High performers have the right attitude for the job.
The best way to measure and predict values, attitudes, drivers and motivations is through personality questionnaire and structured interview.
One study found that soft skill acquisition through training significantly predicted job performance, with a high and lasting impact.
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