Soft Skills | Indispensable Criteria for Finding the Right Candidate

Are you a recruiter or company director? Are you looking for that rare pearl? Go for soft skills! These indispensable skills are becoming increasingly popular with companies. But what exactly are they? The term soft skills encompasses personal aptitudes such as team cohesion, the ability to communicate and manage a team,emotional intelligence and so on. As a guarantee of successful recruitment, focusing on soft skills has become just as essential as ensuring the hard skills (technical competencies) required for the position. Indispensable for finding the best candidate, soft skills are all the rage! Find out more in this article.

Soft skills: what are they?

You may have been accustomed to recruiting your candidates on the basis of their experience and training. Then you realized that this wasn’t enough: communication difficulties, management problems, non-existent team cohesion… The list goes on. So you realized: technical skills are essential, but if my employee is also able to communicate, work as part of a team, and possesses certain aptitudes that facilitate the mission and efficiency of the company, then it’s the ideal combo. By integrating soft skills into your recruitment criteria, it’s no longer a question of being satisfied with the candidate’s experience, but rather of looking for the personal aptitudes and human qualities that will ultimately facilitate the accomplishment of the mission. Companies are well aware of the importance of these cross-disciplinary skills for their own development, and are snapping them up! How are you getting on with soft skills? Have you already incorporated them into your recruitment processes?

But what superpowers are we talking about?

  • generic skills (ability to communicate, learn quickly)
  • interpersonal or behavioral skills (conflict management, teamwork, autonomy, empathy, public speaking, etc.).
  • cognitive skills (speaking several languages, being an excellent negotiator, problem-solving, argumentation, writing, creativity, etc.);
  • organizational skills (managing time, coordinating activities, making even the most difficult decisions, in short, knowing how to make the right decisions).
soft skills conference
Christelle and Véronique from Émotopie, Parcours support partner

These skills are acquired through experience or are innate. While education plays a major role in the acquisition of soft skills, they are also acquired through training. If, in 2023, you still need to argue the case for integrating soft skills into your recruitment process, here are a few figures to convince you. According to Pôle emploi, by 2030, soft skills will undoubtedly be at the heart of companies’ recruitment strategies. Even if 2030 is still a long way off, 92% of companies already consider soft skills to be as important as hard skills, and 80% of companies surveyed agree that soft skills are key success factors for organizations (Source LinkedIn). Soft skills are not only about teamwork and problem-solving, but also about the individual’s ability to assess a situation and react appropriately. What does ChatGPT have to say? For the moment, it’s not possible to delegate soft skills to artificial intelligence! Soft skills are what make human beings so valuable!

The soft skills you need to boost your business

Solving complex problems

The soft skill you need as a leader or manager: your ability to solve complex problems and take the sometimes radical decisions required. This skill presupposes the ability to analyze.

Management skills

Henry Ford once said, “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, working together is success.” This quote, very representative of our times, demonstrates the richness of the collective. However, this collective (in other words, the team) needs to be managed. Developing your leadership and influence with your colleagues and fostering team cohesion are soft skills that you’d do well to develop if you don’t already possess them.

Be creative

An inexhaustible source of innovation, creativity is the flagship skill of start-ups, but not the only one! In fact, it’s the key to breaking away from dominant thought patterns and opening up the field of possibilities. Corporate creativity is essential for any company wishing to secure its future in the short, medium and long term!

Act with kindness

To understand the essential role of benevolence in management, we need to be aware of the impact of relationships on business performance. One solution: develop your emotional intelligence. In fact, independently of an individual’s intellectual capacity, another form of intelligence based on emotional management, such as empathy, is enjoying a certain boom in the corporate world. The more fragile social bonds become, the greater the stress and the lower the productivity. So it’s a question of acting with kindness to reinforce positive feelings such as openness, confidence and self-assurance. Not only do you strengthen your teams’ commitment, but you also deploy their creativity.

Become the master of time

Multiple demands, urgent matters to be dealt with, tasks piling up – this is just one of the many causes of poor time management. The result? An organization that generates stress and a feeling of being subjected to the daily grind. The solution: identify time-wasters, like all those smartphone notifications we spend so much time on.

Soft skills: a performance lever for companies

Soft skills and corporate culture

Finding an employee who shares your company’s values is the wish of every manager. In concrete terms, if the candidate feels at home in his or her environment, it’s a motivating factor. If they fit in with the corporate culture, it’s a guarantee of performance. Companies are undergoing many changes:

  • technology ;
  • regulatory ;
  • organizational ;
  • sanitary ;
  • etc.

Adaptability, open-mindedness and flexibility are therefore essential when recruiting. But how can you detect these precious soft skills in your candidates? The latest HR trend: escape games! Inaddition to other, more conventional tests, an escape game enables recruiters to assess team spirit, listening skills, stress resistance, thinking skills, communication skills, leadership and organizational skills, etc. On the candidate’s side, the game enables the recruiter to assess the candidate’s ability to adapt to new situations. On the candidate’s side, the game breaks with traditional interview codes, making the candidate feel more at ease.

Develop and enhance your soft skills with the customized Parcours program

Far from being just another coworking space, Le Connecteur has developed a training program for business leaders, supported by a collective of 11 expert partners. The aim? To help companies develop their skills and anticipate the major changes of our time! Looking for a tailor-made program to develop your soft skills? Le Connecteur in Biarritz has put together a 3-stage action plan:

1- raise awareness, discover, understand ;

2- experiment via co-creation workshops, conferences, etc. and learn ;

3- act sustainably, share.

The strength of the Parcours program? An alliance between theoretical input and experimentation, in a setting that’s conducive to raising one’s head, inspiring oneself and others!

Are you looking for a customized training program to develop your skills and boost your business? Le Connecteur offers personalized support in the following 4 areas:

  • interpersonal skills ;
  • human resources management issues ;
  • cybersecurity ;
  • CSR.

Ask for your diagnosis and start your Personalized Journey!

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