Hard skills get you the interview — soft skills get you the job

Machines are coming for your hard skills. Here’s why soft skills matter, and how you can cultivate them.

I’ve often felt like a human without a skill set. I fell in love with American history at a young age, studied political science as an undergraduate, and worked in research and consulting for the bulk of my early professional life. I spoke regularly to friends with backgrounds in math, computer science, finance, economics, and felt jealousy at the tangible hard skills — financial models, mathematical proofs, production-ready code — that they were building and could show me.

Despite the fact that I had found relative success, I so lamented the decision that I had made to pursue this generalist path, commenting to friends that “all I learned was how to think critically,” which I assumed was relatively worthless and not distinct.

But with the rise of artificial intelligence, and the exponential gains in power and complexity that machine learning is enabling, I think it’s time to re-evaluate my “generalist hysteria.”

Here’s my hypothesis: In the near future, anything that can be automated will be automated. If we can codify it and pass it to computers, the machines will do it better than any human can. Realistically, this means that the hard skills that we’ve worked so hard to cultivate, to highlight in our resumes, to point to as a tangible signal of our intellect and abilities, are soon to be taken from us by machines that can do it faster and with less errors.

So, what does that leave for the humans? As technology automates away our hard skills, the driving demand for employees will pivot instead to an ability to think outside of the box, navigate change and socio-political work dynamics, and manage our relationships with others.

LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report showed that 92% of talent professionals and hiring managers say that soft skills are just as important–or more important–than hard skills.

So how do you cultivate it inside yourself, and how do you leverage its power in the working world? Let’s dive in.

Cultivating Your Inner Communicator

Start with a Beginner’s Mindset

Beginner’s mind is actually a concept from Zen Buddhism called Shoshin: “Having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.”

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki

There’s significant value in approaching problems as a novice, even if you already know a lot about them. It makes you more willing to experiment, to ask ‘why’ and question the status quo. These are essential soft skills that will come in handy no matter the situation.

Find Moments for Self-Reflection

You won’t know how to improve soft skills in the workplace until you know which soft skills need improvement. So, before you start going through trainings and working to build new skills, it’s essential to first establish which soft skills that you’re most in need of.

To start, reflect on the soft skills you’re already good at (woo), and be honest with yourself about the skills that could use some work. Often, a combination of self-assessment and 360-degree feedback is the best way to identify your soft skills gaps.

Read More

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Reading regularly, and exposing yourself to new voices, ideas, and perspectives on a repeated basis, stands as perhaps the greatest competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive, commoditized age. This is because it cannot be copied, and it cannot be hacked. In order to reap the benefits of learning, you must set aside the time and the mental focus to engage with the material.

But it need not be a massive time suck to reap the rewards of reading. Research shows that people who read books — fiction or nonfiction, ­poetry or prose — for as little as 30 minutes a day over several years lived an average of two years longer than people who didn’t read anything at all. What’s more, reading for this short period of time has been shown to literally rewire your brain and leads directly to greater intelligence and expanded empathy for others.

Reading works because it forces your brain to expand its existing mental models to accommodate the new information it’s taking in. New information and learnings combine with what you already know in ways that build on each other in non-linear ways. In fact, the greatest ideas are most often not net new. Instead, they stem from the innovative blending of multiple things that already exist into something greater than the sum of its parts. This is true of the very first iPhone — created through a unique unification of dozens of technologies that had existed for decades prior — and of Thomas Edison’s initial concept for the lightbulb.

So next time you think to mindlessly tune in to another run through of The Office (I do this very often…), try picking up a book — even if only for a few minutes — instead. Start small: try it for one week, for just 20 to 30 minutes, and see how you feel.

Advancing Soft Skill Development in Your Organization

1) Make soft skills a visible part of performance evaluations

Leaders should be transparent that they plan to evaluate people on their soft skills — their ability to communicate, present, and build relationships outside of their immediate team. They should also publicly give praise to those who exhibit those soft skills, so employees have a benchmark of what success looks like.

Whether it’s a goal of presenting one project to a different team a month, or meeting with a certain number of internal stakeholders to understand their processes, build these types of measurable metrics into how people within the org, leaders included, are evaluated.

2) Bake soft skills into your hiring strategies

While a culture of soft skills begins from the inside, it can be fed from outside. To do this effectively, job interviews can be refocused to critically evaluate potential candidates’ soft skills. Specifically, I recommend not focusing too narrowly on technical expertise in interviews. Instead, ask situational questions of candidates that empower them to think proactively about what they would do, rather than behavioral questions which allow them to share a rehearsed and potentially embellished story of what they have done. In these forward-looking expectations are insights to be gleaned about how this person thinks about situations, what’s important to them, and how they process and synthesize information.

Another best practice is to ask every interviewee, especially those who will be required to interact widely throughout the organization, to prepare and give a presentation as part of the interview process. This allows you to evaluate firsthand their stage presence, communication style, and comfort dealing with tense and ambiguous situations.

3) Foster Productive Conflict in Multidisciplinary Settings

No matter how small, agile, and nimble you may start as a company, you will no doubt slowly but surely begin hunkering down into silos as you grow and mature. Although this may create short-term production efficiencies, it also creates mini-echo chambers in which the right hand doesn’t speak with the left. Yet despite the fact that all segments of the organization are operating with incomplete information, they often find near certainty in the comfort that their approach is right and others wrong.

To break through this:

• Create multi-disciplinary working environments whenever possible, encouraging all parts of you organization — from product to finance to marketing to legal — to seek one another’s inputs as they make progress on their work.
• These multi-disciplinary settings will inherently foster what we call productive conflict, which serves as a natural opportunity for diverse team members to practice and improve their soft skills. Productive conflict is defined as “an open exchange of conflicting or differing ideas in which parties feel equally heard, respected, and unafraid to voice dissenting opinions for the purpose of reaching a mutually comfortable resolution.” Approaching collaborative work in this way instills in the team the sense that not only is it acceptable to disagree, but that it is their obligation to offer dissenting views and shine light on potentially faulty thinking or flawed ideas.

Creating collaborative environments in which conflict and disagreement is actively encouraged compels humans to stretch and expand their ability to empathize with, relate to, and communicate with other human beings. Growing pains are to be expected and embraced, but the long-term gains of this approach should more than make up for any short-term discomfort and awkwardness.

Soft skills are more important today than ever before. As machines take on more and more of the hard skilled labor, humans will be looked to as integrators and synthesizers of diverse perspectives, aims, and objectives, tasked with driving all of this towards a common goal.

I don’t know about you, but that’s an exciting value proposition to me.