Forget A-Levels – Practice your Soft Skills instead!

This is a guest blog written for us by Jay Freeborn of Advorto.

Recruitment, especially graduate recruitment is undergoing a drastic change. Some of the biggest employers are altering the way they recruit by choosing to ignore candidate’s A level results and base their hiring decisions on soft skills. But what does this mean for candidates and the recruiters trying to hire them?

As a candidate looking for a job at PwC, would you be disheartened or pleased to hear that all UCAS score will be eliminated in candidate selection? Those who have studied hard and excel in standardised testing are likely to have the rug pulled out from underneath them. After years of being told that academic success is the path to a good career, they can no longer rely on their good grades to impress employers.

However for those who maybe didn’t achieve the grades they wanted to in school or college may be pleased to know that PwC along with Ernst and Young, Deloitte, Google and others are now putting less and less importance on exam results and degrees, giving candidates the chance to prove their worth in other ways.

The impetus behind this decision seems to lead from both the shortage of talent in the UK, combined with a realisation that school success does not necessarily equate to good employee skills. By expanding application and interview questions to determine a candidates business skills, which according to James Caan include:

• Communication and interpersonal skills
• Teamwork
• Time and self-management
• Decision-making and initiative-taking
• Taking responsibility

For a company who in the past has based decisions on academic success, this way of working will mean overhauling their usual processes. More analysis will have to be done on each candidate’s information to determine their specific skills, rather than simply looking at quantitative figures. In order to do so it is likely that HR teams will have to embrace recruitment software if they have not already, in order to easily analyse and report on the information collected from each candidate.

The shift may also mean recruiters feel the need to use candidate testing tools more frequently, looking to skills testing providers to get the soft skills information on each of their potential hires.

Of course this can only mean good things for the workforce – hiring graduates who have the skills to do well in the office will help them adjust to working life quickly and recruiters can select people who are likely to fit well with the existing company’s culture. This is something that cannot be done through school grades alone.

For further reading please download our whitepaper – The UK’ Soft Skills Shortage

References:

Backing Soft Skills initiative pioneered by James Caan & McDonald’s http://backingsoftskills.co.uk/