How To Detect Hard Skills And Soft Skills Of Your Candidates?

In order to develop an ideal strategy and achieve results as fast as possible, learning what your candidates’ skills are is something to keep an eye on. And being able to distinguish between their hard skills and soft kills is a key element.

Hard Skills Vs. Soft Skills – Which Should Be More Important For Employers?

Long story short, hard skills are related to abilities and soft skills are related to personality. They are both equally important when evaluating a candidate. But in the last few years, soft skills have become a way for employers to choose a worker instead of another one.

If two aplliers to a certain job position have similar experience and hard skills, soft skills should be the decisive point for you. They must tip the balance in favour of one side or the other. Learn more about them below.

What Are Soft Skills?

They are social and interpersonal abilities, related to emotion and communication. Though soft skills are the hardest to find, they can definitely make a worker shine above the rest. 

Research shows that a 75% of the success in a job is determined by soft skills. That is certainly no joke. This type of job skills can be trained, but it requires a day-to-day commitment, and an important amount of self-knowledge.

Soft Skills Examples – Know Them Better

When thinking of soft skills what usually comes to mind is a commonplace like team work, punctuality or perfectionism. These job skills can be important in a certain job position, but can fail to make us decide for one candidate or another, as being too cliché. If all your candidates wrote teamwork in their resume, how can you differentiate them?

Consider these soft skills, which are among the most popular ones in the last few years. Study candidates who highlight them on their resumes. They’re the ones who can make a difference.

• Resilience, related to a person’s own capacity to overcome difficult situations. It talks about stress management and problem-solving skills.
• Empathy, a person’s ability to put themselves in other people’s shoes.
• Assertiveness, a capacity to express feelings and convictions in an honest and kind way, far from apathy and aggressiveness. It’s key to solving arguments in a healthy way.
• Active listening, a person’s ability to make others feel listened and understood.
• Creativity, in any possible way, not just the artistic one.
• Persuasion, not necessarily through intimidation, rather through words and communication.
• Adaptability and flexibility to unexpected issues.
• Emotional intelligence, which is fundamental to acknowledge and appreciate people’s feelings.

What Are Hard Skills?

Hard skills are all the required abilities to successfully develop a job. They are learnt through training or education, and can be found in books, courses or degrees. It can take years to master a hard skill, but it can always be the key to open a door in your carrer.

These hard skills will usually be a strong part of a candidate’s resume, and you should use them to filter between candidates. If one of them does not meet the required hard skills, they will not be suitable for the position.

Check Our Hard Skills List

You probably already know what your hard skills are, or at least you have an overall view. Hard skills depend on the work sphere and are obviously very different from one job to the other.

However, you should take note as for what are the most popular hard skills in the last few years. Many of them are common to different job enviroments, thus you should have them localized in order to detect them quickly in a candidate. Take note below:

• A foreign language is a must. A second (or even third!) foreign language makes an employee stand out. Keep an eye out on Chinese, Spanish or Arab, since they are the most demanded ones.
• Computer programming can be hard to find, but a competent computer programmer is a must if your team works on the Internet.
• Basic accessibility knowledge is something any enterprise should be considering as of now. For instance, Basic Sign Language shows the company cares about everybody being included.
• Cloud computing is the future. If your enterprise is evolving through it, make sure you look for it in a candidate.
• Data analysis can always be useful, whatever field we are talking about.
• Accounting is always a good option, even on a basic level.
• Design and marketing is a standout. You can make use of it in many different departments of your company, so a candidate with these hard skills is a gem.
• Management is also a great standout for candidates. Negotiation, communication or public speaking are not skills you should skip when filtering candidates.

Detecting Hard Skills And Soft Skills In Candidates

• To find the hard skills and soft skills of the candidates, we approach from different angles. Hard skills can be found in their resume. They are measurable and you can always take a test to check the candidate’s level. In the case of soft skills, detecting them depends on your ability as an interviewer.

Because soft skills will come out when you interview the candidate. The way to find these skills is by asking the right questions. The most useful method is to present situations and ask the candidate how they would act. For example:

• You face a disagreement with a colleague about how to act in the upcoming campaign. You know you are right. How do you act?
• Tell me about a time when you had a bad result on a project. How did you deal with it?
• You are running late with today’s assignment and a colleague approaches you for help. What do you do?

Which Job Skills Are The Most Valuable In 2022?

As of now, you can probably tell that it isn’t an easy task to answer a question like this. For instance, occupational therapist jobs will have different needs than other positions. We have listed some of the most important ones. But you should keep in mind that the needs of the position will determine which skills are relevant.

Job skills are a pivotal part of your employee search, and you should keep an eye on them. In a fast world as our own, the demand for skills is always changing, so you should watch for trends and always stay one step ahead!

For you, what are the most important skills in a candidate? How do you detect their soft skills and hard skills? Tell us about it in the comment section below.

Jobstoday.world is here to help you find the best candidates. Take advantage of our 14-day free trial and remember we offer you access to a 100% application guarantee! Check our job posting costs and let’s work together now.

See more:

• The perfect chance to detect your candidates’ skills is a job interview. Brush up on how to conduct them online.
• Be ready to work with candidates in the future by studying what the future of recruiting will be like.
• Candidates are one of the most important sources of your work. Find out the newest ways to attract talent.

Marketing is a highly demanded hard skill. Our Best Marketing Jobs post can tell you more about what a Marketing worker looks for in a job position.