Best Soft Skills That Will Make You Hired

“An individual step in character training is to put the responsibility on the individual.” -Robert Baden Powell 

A recent survey on the increasing value of soft skills 

Over 50 % of recruiters give priority to soft skills, shows survey –  With the change in the work environment, especially after the covid 19 pandemic, that forced people to opt for remote work, soft skills have become more important than ever before. A recent survey found that 57 per cent of recruiters give priority to soft skills. Recruiters expect their candidates to have a strong command of the language along with selling skills. Consequently, jobseekers are equipped with good communication and experience with sales. Six in 10 employees expect economic growth to continue and the pandemic to fade away, and seven in 10 to spend more time upskilling. According to a recent survey of the Indian Soft Skills Market, the market is expected to exhibit a CAGR of 15.4% during 2022-2027. Not only the startups and SMEs but the Tier 1 companies are also laying the focus on the soft skills amongst their potential employees.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are the character traits and interpersonal skills that decide a person’s behaviour toward other people. They are the combination of people’s skills, social skills and communication skills, and emotional intelligence that make it easy to go harmoniously with other people. Unlike hard skills, they are not straightforward to acquire as they are not clearly defined, and cannot be measured or taught in the classroom. While the hard skills can be taught in the classroom through well-defined training by the educators such as training in ms office or ms excel, they are usually called job-specific skills. But when it comes to soft skills, they can be acquired through small talk empathy or flexibility.

Types of Soft skills:

Employers look for employees who already possess such soft skills so that they don’t need to do much hard work in training them. We are listing the six most prominent soft skills which are required in the workplace that will guarantee success and make you hired in one go.

• Communication skills – Both written and verbal communication are essential in any workplace because it allows the employees to have effective interaction with people that they encounter such as clients, customers, traders, colleagues etc. and build strong relationships with them. Good communication is also associated with active listening; it’s a technique where you wait for what another person is saying before you go ahead and speak in between. Thus an active and efficient communicator has possess different characteristics such as 

• Active listening 
• Adapting 
• Clarity 
• Confidence 
• Empathy 
• Social Skills 
• Open-mindedness and patience 

• Teamwork – For achieving a big goal of the company or the organization, the people must work together. Working together will improve the quality of the work, as the people would then be using their strengths and also use skills in collaboration. Almost every company wants their potential employees to mention in their resumes that they are team players. If one is struggling for being a team player and if he feels that he is the one who is best in the whole team he must keep his ego aside and let his colleagues grow up. 

Being an effective team player will help the organization in many ways such as 

• There will be less conflict 
• The people termination ratio will be decreased 
• The workplace will be more attractive 

• Adaptability – The situation in the workplace never gets constant, it keeps on changing and the employees must accept such changes and move with the required trends. If the candidates possess the skill of adaptability then it lays a positive impact on the employer’s mind. Employers will feel more comfortable in hiring those candidates who adapt to the changes and actively learn the new policies and how to deal with them. They happily hire those candidates who do the research and attend the training session to learn something new. Thus the characteristics of a good and adaptive candidate must be he should be calm, inquisitive, positive and curious about new things and trends. 

• Leadership – Leadership is one of the most demanding skills of today. It is the mixture of almost all soft skills as this one can easily work individually as well within a team. Leadership is the art of directing and influencing others’ behaviour. It can be learnt through various courses being done online, as this is the skill set that very rare people possess within themselves. Characteristics of an effective leader are 

• Ability to work with minimal guidance and supervision 
• Authenticity 
• Decision Making 
• Accountability 
• Responsibility 
• Crisis management 
• Modesty and many more 

• Work Ethic – Following the work ethic and code of conduct positively impacts your image. It shows your ability to work independently by abiding by all rules and policies of the organization, your work ethic shows your punctuality and sincerity towards your responsibility. Sometimes in any working environment, you have to take responsibility which is beyond your experience but it shows that you are ready to take the work regardless.
• Time management – Time management is the ability to delegate your time for specific activities. This allows you to manage your workload and time efficiently so that you can focus more on learning productive things. Time management helps the person to learn to prioritize the tasks according to which one is more important. 

Characteristics of Efficient time management are –

• Decision making 
• Delegation 
• Focus 
• Goal setting 
• Planning 
• Prioritizing

The skill sets which are listed above are the most demanding and prominent, so the candidate before designing his / her resume must take a self-analysis test and then decide which types of skills he is already pursuing and which types of skills he needs to learn to get the particular job. 

•  How do soft skills help in hiring? 

Though hard skills are particular technical skills, soft skills are the personality traits that define your behaviour Soft skills are those immeasurable traits that even complement your hard skills and let you use your hard skills to a greater extent, they lay a positive response to the manager that he gets attracted to you and makes you different from the other candidates. It is better to highlight your soft skills in your resume. Highlighting optimum and best-needed soft skills would then be a task, one must keep the fact in mind that for which type of job he is applying and what is its job description because the resume is built with the help of JD only. The applicant while designing the resume must keep the point in mind that he should use the keywords regarding his skills according to the requirement; for example, for applying for the job of manager one must mention his soft skills such as good communicator, good and active listener and leadership. This type of keywords will help the employer to shortlist the candidate easily and his probability of selection gets increased. Moreover, the chances of shortlisting resumes by the software also increase in that case as compared with the people who don’t highlight their soft skills. This will distinguish them from other similar candidates. 

Apart from the benefits of shortlisting your resume, the benefit is also driven by personal interviews. If you are an aspirant to work in Tier 1 companies then you must lay focus on the soft skills while giving the introduction because of big companies such as TCS, DELOITTE, WIPRO, EY and others. As these companies mention in their Job Description what type of Skills do they require?

It’s rightly said that having a blend of both hard skills and soft skills would make your hiring process run smoothly.

• How can someone acquire soft skills? 

Soft skills are self-driven and self-learning skills that can be seen and experienced in his personality. But some people feel it is difficult to recognise their skills, such as leadership skills. There are tips to learn that trait; one must try to use the technique of team management and try to become the team head in a particular organization or college society, he should begin to delegate an effective amount of work to everyone in his team. One must start to learn everyone‘s perspective for that he should begin writing about his experience on the platforms like Linkedin and quora where he will receive honest reviews from people and which will direct and influence his behaviour. Apart from this, one can use some of the online learning platforms like Coursera, Udemy, skill arena and our very own platform here.in 

In conclusion to this article, I would like to write that possessing soft skills and then designing them on your plate is an art which can be learned and acquired by joining us here.in (https://hireyy.com/) We provide the best online certification courses to learn the traits.

References; Economics Times ImarcGroup Indeed