When hiring someone for a job, what people are looking for most often are the hard skills, expertise, experience or qualifications specific to certain jobs and/or industries. These might include functional skills in human resources like recruiting, or technical skills like proficiency in the Angular Web application framework. Unfortunately, hard skills are usually not transferable across many different jobs or life situations.
Hard skills and experience are specific from one job to another. Even though you are offering the same job, you cannot always expect them to perform the same as before as you will be putting them on a different working environment with different set of people working with a different system. So, even if they will just do the same kind of job, it is not wise to base your judgment whether they will stand out or not to their past experiences or former jobs. This can help though to identify if they have enough expertise to do the job. But this is not enough.
This is where soft skills are needed to be considered. These qualities are not specific for the job but will help know how a person will act or behave on situations possible within the working condition that you have with your company.
Combining both hard skills and soft traits is required for people to excel at their jobs. Some would even say that hard skills are “hygiene factors” to undertake the job, whereas soft traits are what distinguish good employees from great ones.
Here are some of the soft skills that you have to look for along with the hard skills to know whether the person is the perfect one for the job:
Effective Communication and teamwork – These critical soft traits are usefulfor collaboration across all jobs and organizations. This is also helpful with the constant demands of the business world across a fragmented workforce. With these traits, He/she would easily get along with other stakeholders and employees and create an ideal working environment free from conflict and filled with productivity.
Motivation and eagerness to learn – Having the hard skills for today’s job may be enough for now but still; nothing beats being motivated and eager to learn the skills for tomorrow’s job.
Openness to experience – People who excel with this trait can be more adaptable to change, able to work with new ideas better, and respond well to diversity in the workplace.
Patience – Working towards grueling long term goals require a certain level of stamina and perseverance. Those who have patience are able to passionately pursue these long term goals while those without it give up easily.
Initiative and sense of being proactive – An employee who is proactive is always thinking ahead of time and has vision of the future. He/she would also take the initiative and not wait to be told what to do.
Now, stop referring on that CV alone and start looking for the right traits mentioned on the list above!
