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Soft skills in executive recruitment

A guide to evaluating essential soft-skills in executive recruitment.

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Effective hiring now goes beyond a candidate’s experience and hard skills detailed on their CV.  Employers invite candidates for interviews based on their background, but ultimately hire candidates based on their personality.

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This shift in perspective means that previously overlooked traits like kindness, empathy, resilience, and adaptability have now taken centre stage.  These ‘soft skills’ don’t replace essential hard skills, instead, they enable the effective application of those hard skills in social environments, such as the office.

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While a candidate may appear perfect on paper, their soft skills will ultimately determine their success in a new role.

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What are soft skills?

Soft skills are social skills in a business setting. They require high levels of emotional intelligence (the ability to interpret emotions and use that information productivity). This means having a level of self-awareness and social awareness to enable the building and maintenance of positive relationships. These attributes can enhance workplace productivity and performance. Examples of soft skills include:
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  • communication and listening skills
  • conflict resolution
  • collaboration and cooperation
  • likeability
  • openness to feedback
  • critical thinking and decision-making
  • adaptability and continuous learning
  • kindness
  • resilience
  • empathy
  • creative thinking
  • engagement and motivation

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Why are soft skills essential to leaders?

In today’s increasingly complex global business landscape, leaders need soft skills to:
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  • influence peers
  • build and lead high-performing teams
  • communicate effectively with clients
  • match organisational issues with problem solvers
  • orchestrate internal communication
  • make strategic decisions under pressure
  • adapt to change

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Soft skills distinguish exceptional leaders from competent ones.

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How should we evaluate soft skills?

Given the extensive list of soft skills, it is important to determine which are essential for the role you are recruiting for and focus on evaluating them in interview.

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Real-life scenarios are the best way to assess soft skills, so the recruitment process and interview techniques should be adapted accordingly.

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Companies will need to develop custom-made tools, tailored to the business, with a scoring system.

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There are three main ways to test soft skills:

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Self-reporting:

  • Ask potential candidates to rank which soft skills they believe are essential for the role, and then ask them to evaluate those qualities in themselves.
  • Get candidates to speak about real-life situations at work and how they dealt with them. Their answer will usually follow a pattern: situation, task needed, action, result. Questions could include ‘tell me about a time you had to deal with a team member who constantly opposed your ideas’ or ‘tell me about a time when a project’s priorities changed suddenly, and you had to adapt’.
  • Get them to explain the most technical aspects of their work in non-technical language to someone who isn’t from the same function.

Other reporting:

  • Referrals are essential before any important hire. Getting referrals from ex-colleague specifically on the soft skills you have prioritised for this role, will help to get outside perspective.
  • Companies are now experimenting with alternative interview formats for all candidates, including experience days, meeting the team, trial work periods, or even a co-created process. Completing a short project with a team or a leading a 60-minute group exercise will help to see how candidates act when interacting with others.
  • Assess personal skills when the candidate is not expecting it by asking employees, drivers, café workers, receptionists etc. on how the candidate treated them.

Ability testing:

  • Give the candidate a real-life situation from your company and have them to walk through how they would solve it, identifying at each step the soft skills needed. Make sure these scenarios test the soft skills you are looking for.
  • There are various psychometric assessments for emotional intelligence that can be considered.

Considerations

Soft skills should not be confused with empathy bias, especially during interviews. You might mistakenly assume that those individuals possess broadly applicable social skills simply because you connected easily with them. It is important to create an interview process that considers the entire team, rather than relying on like-mindedness with one person.

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While soft skills are hard to train, awareness of social skills should be an integral component of internal talent management strategies. Organisations can make strong social skills a criterion for promotion, and task supervisors with nurturing such skills in high-potential subordinates.

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Case study

A multinational company hired a Chief Financial Officer, who looked great on paper and performed well in interview and psychometric assessments. However, once in the role, it became apparent that they struggled to read the room and came across as arrogant by dominating meetings and not listening. As a result, they faced challenges in achieving stakeholder buy-in from various parts of the business, leading to the termination of their employment within six months.

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