f professional skills are the "house", then soft skills are the "wall" to strengthen and protect that house more solidly and strongly against all challenges and storms.
Besides professional knowledge and work experience, employers always ask questions and situations about soft skills at work to accurately assess the potential of candidates. So which soft skills are the most important? How to evaluate the soft skills of the candidate? Navigos Search will reveal right below. Let's explore!
1. What are soft skills?
Soft skills (Soft Skills) is a term used to refer to important skills in human life such as: life skills, communication, listening, leadership, teamwork, independent work, management time, withstand pressure, create and innovate…
Soft skills are essential skills in work
2. Why soft skills are important to every candidate, every job
It is more effective to evaluate a candidate based on soft skills than based on hard skills alone. Most employers prefer to choose people who fit the corporate culture and that job position. Assessing candidates based on soft skills will help employers easily find a person who is both professional and suitable for the business to stick with for a long time.
Especially in every job, soft skills will help people feel comfortable, save time, find a scientific workflow, and complete work with higher efficiency.
Unlike soft skills, hard skills refer to expertise, degrees, certifications or proficiency in a certain field. However, the common point of soft skills and hard skills of a candidate is that they both help them improve themselves. These two skills complement each other with the aim of improving the level, cognitive ability and improving a person's life.
3. Important soft skills for success
You should practice the necessary skills in the following jobs to easily achieve success:
- Management: Help the candidate become a leader and have a certain influence. Focus on practicing this skill to promote work spirit, bring positive energy to yourself and everyone around. From there, ensure the completion of work goals effectively.
- Communicating and Active Listening: This skill includes verbal communication, written communication, nonverbal communication, and visual communication. If you know how to listen actively, know how to exchange information, people will open up relationships themselves, creating more and better opportunities.
- Problem Solving: This skill uses knowledge and life to solve problems that arise at work. With the ability to handle and provide effective solutions, the problem will come to the best and most thorough results.
- Teamwork : This is an important skill in every job. Listening to teammates, getting along well with everyone and having a sense of responsibility in common work will help implement and complete all projects with high results.
- Time management: "Time is money", if you know how to allocate time and prioritize work order, your work efficiency and productivity will increase significantly. Since then, people have been able to balance work and personal and family life.
- Creative thinking: People with this skill will quickly succeed because they always find new things, break out of the framework. In today's era of racing with market trends, candidates with high creative thinking ability are always sought after by employers.
- Withstand high pressure: Help people adapt to new situations and challenges, be ready to face difficulties, embrace change to bring better work results.
The most important set of soft skills for any job
4. How to accurately assess a candidate's soft skills
As mentioned above, in order to accurately view a candidate, in addition to hard skills, employers must also consider soft skills. Here are some suggestions on how to evaluate candidates' soft skills that your business can refer to:
Provide a scale of soft skills for candidates to self-assess
During the interview, the employer should ask the candidate to list the skills needed to successfully complete the position they are applying for. You can give a rating scale of 10 or 100 for candidates to self-assess and find out their own outstanding skills.
In case the candidate does not know which skills are important, you should reconsider the candidate. After determining the scale of each person, please evaluate and continue to survey the candidate according to the suggestions below.
Ask a situational question
Employers must be able to give a specific situation and assume the problem is not related to the candidate's available experience in order to check the qualifications and how to solve the situation.
A specific example:
You make the assumption when the business has many conflicting opinions and there are opposing opinions with the candidate's opinion, how do they deal with it?
A business is like a miniature society, always filled with individuals with different personality traits, circumstances, and qualities. If the candidate only values their own opinion and does not pay attention to the opinions of other members, then they are definitely a person who cannot get along.
This problem affects the ability to work as a team and the candidate will find it difficult to combine with others to solve common tasks. And certainly, this is not the brightest candidate that the business is looking for.
Indispensable behavioral questions
Behavioral questions will focus primarily on the candidate's real-life experiences. This is a way for you to evaluate the candidate's experience, determine whether the candidate is able to withstand high pressure, how well they communicate with customers, how professional ethics are, ...
Some behavioral questions that employers can use to survey candidates are:
- In your previous work, have you had any problems with your superiors? If yes, how do you solve it?
- When working in a group, if members have conflicts, how do you handle them?
- Who is the best manager you have ever worked with? Why do you feel that way about them? Did you learn anything from them?
- In the process of working, have you ever solved a task that you thought you could not solve? What did you do to pass, well done it?
- Have you ever had a difficult situation with a customer? Please tell me your solution?
Offer short-term challenges and projects
Employers can also test candidates through temporary projects, mini-projects, mock projects, etc. Challenge the candidate in another test after the interview or probationary period. Then ask them to restate how they completed the project and defend their technical thesis.
How to evaluate the soft skills of the candidate?
Does your company accurately assess the soft skills of the candidate?
With hard skills assessment, employers can rely on qualifications, work experience certificates, ... But to accurately consider soft skills of candidates is not easy, requires employees to work. Recruitment must have extensive experience and know-how in the profession.
The above suggestions can help your business screen candidates but are not the most suitable and qualified candidates. In order not to miss talent, even recruit the wrong person and accurately assess the candidate's professional skills, soft skills and experience, businesses should use recruitment services through a reputable headhunter company. - Navigos Search.
The biggest advantage of Navigos Search is possessing a huge data of 375,000+ senior candidates, 85,000+ senior management candidates for headhunters to assist your business in recruiting personnel in all fields and industries.
In addition, with a team of highly experienced consultants , deeply knowledgeable in each core industry field, and a strict and strict working process to ensure the best quality recruitment information. All of these have helped Navigos Search reach new heights in customer service quality, leading in the field of recruiting mid- and senior-level personnel in Vietnam.
Navigos Search's optimal recruitment solution is:
- Talent recruitment: Navigos Search's dedicated team of consultants will always stand by businesses from the time of recruitment needs until the time of receiving candidates.
- High-level recruitment: Navigos Search will provide a specialized recruitment team to cooperate with businesses in the recruitment process of high-level personnel, ensuring the selection of candidates and the best quality for businesses in a certain time. .
- Outsourcing the recruitment process: Outsourcing the recruitment process ensures faster recruitment processes, results, superior candidate quality and helps improve business efficiency when you hire the right people. We offer a dedicated team of recruitment specialists for your business.
- Japan Desks: All consultants have extensive knowledge and experience in the field of recruitment in the Japanese market, and we also have native Japanese consultants to assist you in your strategy. your recruitment strategy.
Over 20 years of experience in recruiting mid-level and senior-level personnel, we are proud to have supported hundreds of thousands of businesses and corporations to help them get the best human resources.
We are committed to accurately and comprehensively evaluate candidates in terms of professional skills, work experience, soft skills at work, qualities, attitudes,... Right now, if your business is Need to find personnel for any position, contact Navigos Search to quickly get the most suitable and potential candidate!
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