Must Have Soft Skills

It amazes me how we focus so much on someone’s technical skills and past accomplishments and so little on what is, for my money, the most important set of skills needed by a successful employee… soft skills.

Soft skills are defiend any skill or quality that can be classified as a personality trait or habit. Interpersonal skills and communication skills are more specific categories of soft skills that many employers look for in job candidates. Unlike technical or “hard” skills, soft skills are not about the knowledge you possess but rather the behaviors you display in different situations.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges with hiring for soft skills, is that there are so many of them. A quick Google search on most in demand soft skills brings back a laundry list (here’s 30):

1. Exceptional communication skills
2. A proclivity for learning new things
3. Active listening skills
4. A good grasp of working in the cloud
5. Patience and persistence
6. Superior time management skills
7. Superb research ability
8. Good organizational skills
9. An assertive attitude
10. Flexibility/adaptability

This make seem like overkill, but really you have to factor in all these things when you hire. And we generally do subconsciously. Our brain looks the candidates soaks up what we have read about them, what we see in front of us and then mashes that up with all what we want to see in the candidate. Before we know it our own biases move us to a pretty quick decision on the person.

So it’s even more important that we use this list, as a checklist to make sure we are really looking at what is there and not what we want to see. Hard skills can be easily test. Academic and professional experiences can be easily validated. But soft skills, we need to be looking for these. Here are 10 more.

1. Reliability
2. Resourcefulness
3. Managing expectations and instilling confidence
4. Adding value
5. Trustworthy / honest
6. Confident
7. Organized
8. Trustworthy / honest
9. Professional
10. Approachable

So some of these are starting to overlap, which is part of my point. Assessing soft skills is not easy. One of the reasons some organizations turn to personality assessments like the Myers-Briggs is to help get to the bottom of a candidate’s true soft skills. But even that is limited, because those are snapshots of when they are taken and they also can change depending on circumstances.

Ideally though, we can start to select which soft skills are most important to us as an employer. And if you are looking for work, you can figure out what skills you have, how to best showcase them and where you might need to add some new ones to you skill set you demonstrate to the person interviewing you.

Ok, let’s get the last batch of ten that my team complied when searching Google for “most in demand soft skills”.

1. Problem solver
2. Proactive
3. Self-motivated
4. Relationship builder
5. Project management skills
6. Leadership skills
7. Ability to work as part of a Team
8. Interpersonal Skills
9. Open-mindedness
10. Work ethic

You get my point. Soft skills are a pretty nebulous area of focus when hiring someone. And if you are hiring remotely or via video interview, this can be even more daunting. So to help, I have picked out the 5 most important to me.

You can check out my YouTube video here for the rundown of the five soft skills I most value in my team. I have 100 employees, almost all working virtually supporting my businesses as well as a dozen clients.

In all, cases we have excelled in solving problems and coming up with solutions, primarily because we have the ability to plan, possess excellent communication skills, take the initiative, are patient and honest. That is our secret sauce.

Daniel Meyer heads both Sonic Analytics and Sonic Virtual Staffing, sister companies that deliver both data analytics solutions and virtual staffing to businesses in the United States and the Philippines. With over 20 years in Big Data and Virtual Staffing, Dan is one of the most sought-after public speakers in Asia and offers big data coaching and analytics training seminars on both sides of the Pacific.

Sonic Analytics(www.sonicanalytics.com) brings big data analytics solutions like business intelligence, business dashboards and data storytelling to small and medium sized organizations looking to enhance their data-driven decision-making capabilities.

Sonic Virtual Staffing (www.sonicva.com) brings virtual staffing solutions like graphic design, social media management, bookkeeping and specialized virtual assistants for authors and professional speakers to small and medium sized organizations looking to scale on a budget and looking for 24/7 staffing options.

When not training current and future analysts, you can find Dan championing the use of analytics to empower data-driven citizenship by volunteering his expertise with schools and non-profits dedicated to evidence-based social progress.