Soft skills" are non-technical, abstract abilities related to how candidates work. These skills, which include how you interact with colleagues, how you solve problems, and how you manage your work, have become increasingly important in the workplace. Whether you’re looking for a new job or trying to seize new career opportunities in your current position and company, these skills are highly valuable!
Let’s take a look at "soft skills," which became a favorite of experts, especially HR professionals, in 2020!
What Do Soft Skills Include?
No matter what our profession is, how we work, aside from technical details, is very important. The relationships built with people and the communication skills developed make the work you do more valuable. In this sense, communication skills, including listening, understanding, and speaking, time management, empathy, problem-solving, teamwork, taking responsibility, and leadership skills all fall under this category.
Recruitment and interview professionals place great importance on candidates who can adapt to changes, make a difference, and possess more than just technical knowledge. The presence of these skills in a candidate is an indicator of potential success. While there may be hundreds of graduates from prestigious schools and departments with excellent technical skills, candidates with expertise in these types of soft skills are much more limited in number.
These types of skills, which are also related to your attitudes and intuitions, are not easy to prove. You should keep in mind that trying to present yourself as something more than you are could make you seem like a pushy candidate. Remember, the experts conducting your interview will not expect you to have all these qualities and experiences from day one. However, knowing that you are open to learning these skills in the role you are applying for will be appreciated by them.
As we’ve mentioned before, we encounter soft skills in every profession. To illustrate, let’s say you are a doctor. No matter how many surgical skills you have, you must ensure that your patients take you seriously and trust you through emotional intelligence, reliability, and communication skills. Without these, you won’t have any patients to consider you, and we could say that your professional skills will either dull over time or fail to satisfy you. As you can imagine, in departments like sales and marketing, where persuasion skills are crucial, these soft skills are even more important.
How to Acquire?
If you’ve been working for a while or spent your university life participating in social activities and student clubs, the concept of 'soft skills' has likely developed in you to some extent. If you've helped solve a problem for an unhappy client in the business world or tried to persuade different school departments, you’ve used your problem-solving and persuasion skills.
You can develop these skills through your experiences, but they can also be gained years later, even by your manager, whom you admire or enjoy working with. However, rather than waiting for these skills to be forced upon you, you might consider what you need to work on developing. For example, instead of discussing problems with your manager, you could try to come up with solutions, or if you see a colleague struggling, you could offer to join them to help improve the process.
In interviews, employers typically won’t ask you directly whether you have these types of skills. Instead, they will present situations where you can use them and ask how you would handle them to assess your social skills.
How to Emphasize?
When applying for a new job and preparing for the interview, highlight not only your job-related skills but also your social skills. While preparing, make a list of the skills you possess related to the desired position, and then list what you think the job may require. When comparing the lists at the end, make sure to be honest.
During the interview, while talking about yourself, sprinkle these skills into your sentences in a consistent and measured way. You can make the interviewer feel that you're listening carefully by maintaining good eye contact, which will easily demonstrate your listening skills. You can also refer to some of these social skills in the 'skills and abilities' section of your CV.