The Soft Skills Surge: Why They Could Be the New Recruitment Gold

Here our partners, JobLookUp, share their thoughts on the soft skills surge – and why you need to think about it. 

What’s the first thing you look for on a candidate’s CV?

Their qualifications?

Their experience?

These two areas have been the essential highlights for jobseekers and recruiters alike, almost since the day the CV was invented (by Leonardo Da Vinci in 1482, no less). And with good reason.

Knowing an applicant’s employment history and experience gives a pretty reliable sign of their professional capabilities. It can deliver valuable insight into how reliable a candidate is, and how committed they are to their career.

With having  degree-level qualifications, industry-specific accreditations, or professional certifications are helpful too. They paint an accurate picture of how well a prospective employee will understand the business sector, and more granular aspects of a role, while also showcasing professional skill sets.

Given the risk and costs of bad hires. Every employer (and recruiter) wants as much of a guarantee as possible that they’ll end up with the ideal candidate for any open position.

It makes perfect sense then, that we put such a high value on qualifications and education when considering applicants. But will this always be the case? Maybe not.

The significance of soft skills has been gaining traction for some time now. We encourage serious consideration of soft skills in the JobLookup Ultimate Hiring Guide as part of an overall hiring strategy, for example. This is because many leading employers, both in the UK and globally, are attributing more value to candidates with qualities like leadership, critical and creative thinking, and emotional intelligence.

Many would still argue that soft skills take second place to education and experience. Now, however, we’re potentially amid a perfect storm that has been brewing for some time – one that may upend aspects of traditional recruitment.

Soft skills could be poised to overtake both qualifications and experience in terms of importance on CVs, because of the combined influence of three fundamental factors.

The Existing Skills Gap

It’s no secret we’re already amid a severe skills gap. The Open University Business Barometer found the cost of skills shortages to business was in the billions (£6.3 billion, to be precise), and that was back in 2018.

As of 2020, research by the Edge Foundation suggested that a combination of ‘non-cognitive’ skills, such as empathy and communication, along with digital and tech skills, will be the most essential ones for the workforce to have in the coming years. The importance of soft skills for candidates is something we’ve also been keen to highlight to jobseekers, as part of JobLookup’s Future Work series, given the changing demands of the jobs of tomorrow.

The UK isn’t alone in this problem either. It’s estimated that around one-third of the EU workforce has no digital skills. Many of these workers, including those here in the UK, have little incentive, or means, to learn digital skills.

When we also consider that essential ‘non-cognitive’ skills are not even taught in many schools, the scale and long-term affects of this issue become increasingly striking. This is further compounded by minimal support for adult learning, in both non-cognitive and digital skills.

Increasing Automation

It’s a common misconception that automation is going to eliminate swathes of jobs. The truth is a little more nuanced.

Let’s take the US stock market as an example. While exact estimates vary, as of 2019 80% of US stock market trading was fully automated, according to JP Morgan. Despite this, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the demand for jobs in the finance, commodities and investment banking sectors will increase around 10% from 2014 to 2024.

In many cases, automation won’t simply kill off jobs – it will evolve them. While this will greatly vary by sector, and some jobs will cease to exist, many will simply change.

To meet that change the workforce will, in most cases, need a different skillset. We know what those skills are, and we also know that we’re behind when it comes to getting the workforce where they need to be with these skills.

Covid-19

So, we know there is a skills shortage that isn’t being effectively tackled. We also know this skills gap will be further driven by the creep (or dash) of increasing automation.

There has been general agreement on the workforce issues ahead, but also perhaps the idea that we did, at least, have some time to tackle these issues. Even if that was previously true, it’s certainly no longer the case.

No one could have seen COVID-19 coming, and perhaps more pertinently, how the virus would speed up the impacts of both the skills shortage and uptake of automation.

Job losses in certain sectors, such as retail, have been happening at a steady pace for some time. Now, thanks to the knock-on effects of Coronavirus, many of these declining sectors have been accelerated into freefall at a pace we couldn’t possibly have expected.

It’s the same story for other ideas or approaches that previously seemed a long way off: flexible working, shorter working weeks, fully online onboarding and interview processes, and even the concept of universal basic income.

There are other problems, of course. Not only has the pandemic led to a huge increase in unemployment and bankrupt businesses (with more looking likely, unfortunately), it has also caused massive damage to the education prospects of multiple generations.

All of these factors will only serve to massively amplify the skills problem, both in the short and long term. We are faced with a changing, and currently contracting, job market with high skills demands, and an ever-growing number of jobseekers with increasingly devalued skills, and few opportunities to upskill.

The Soft Skills Solution

To summarise then, in terms of jobs and employment we’re likely to see:

• Ever-increasing demand for tech and digital roles
• More demand for candidates with leadership and communication skills
• Basic technological and digital literacy as a candidate baseline
• More demand for candidates with emotional intelligence and empathy

And to meet this need, a significant amount of our workforce will:

• Have missed out on around two years of foundational or higher education
• Be under skilled
• Not received any non-cognitive skills training
• Have potentially large gaps in employment

While this is simplifying things to some degree, we can at least start to frame the nature of the problem recruiters and businesses will be facing. The normal indicators used to identify a top candidate may not be as reliable as they once were, because they simply may not be available.

There’s every chance that great candidates will have missed out on education due to COVID-19, been made redundant, missed out on career networking or training, and so on. How can they be accurately assessed in these cases?

Soft skills.

Finding applicants that have adaptability, potential, and a willingness to learn could start to trump experience and education – especially given many candidates and jobseekers may, through no fault of their own, be missing these currently fundamental insights on their CV from the outset.

Luckily, there are plenty of tools available to recruiters to help spot soft skills. From psychological or gamified assessments and carefully considered interview questions, to personalised training and support. There’s no reason recruiters and HR teams can’t help to turn the situation around, and still deliver star candidates.

That’s not to say that qualifications and education won’t be valuable – they will. The unfortunate reality is, however, they will probably be at a premium. There almost certainly won’t be enough of these candidates to go around – there already isn’t.

This leaves recruiters with two options:

Either keep candidates with desirable experience and qualifications close – challenging but possible, although potentially not sustainable long term.

Or focus more on soft skills and assessing potential candidates for them. This may be more viable in the long term, when CV work and educational gaps start materialising in greater numbers.

Could the increased importance of soft skills become the start of complete rejig of recruitment (and who knows, an end to the CV entirely), or simply another high-value platform to consider candidates on? Both are possible, but it’s hard to argue with the increasing importance of soft skills either way.

In the end, everyone can only benefit from attributing more value to soft skills – jobseekers, recruiters, and businesses alike, and as we’ve seen, it may soon be an essential strategy.

Author biography: 

Simon Marshall, Head of Content and Communications at JobLookup.
Simon is a technology enthusiast, with an interest in how the application of science, philosophy, ethics, and psychology can benefit us in both the workplace and wider society.