The top 3 soft skills to check for in a potential new hire

The first step when hiring for a job role typically involves matching the job requirements with the skills, experiences, educational qualifications needed to perform the job. These are the hard skills which are learnt throughout the career. Once the basic selection is done on the basis of these criteria, a recruiter is still left with quite a large pool of potential hires. To screen out from these candidates, one needs to emphasize on the soft skills they possess and weed out further.

Three definitive soft skills that one should look for in a potential new hire no matter what their role is include time management, humility and respect.

Time Management –

A candidate who has good time management skills is going to be able to take on multiple tasks and get them done in an efficient manner. Even if they are going to miss their deadline they will pace themselves so closely that they will see ahead of time that it is going to be a miss and keep you updated accordingly. Essentially they would be someone you can pass on jobs and rest assured that it will be taken care of efficiently.  So how can one find out?  Ask candidates to describe a time when they had multiple projects and how they handled it. Keep an ear out for organizational strategies they used and ways they coped with having multiple projects, including delegating parts of it and keeping their manager abreast of issues they were having.

Humility –

One greatly underappreciated soft skill is humility. The ability for someone to own up or admit to their mistake when they did wrong shows someone who will be a good teammate and good direct report. They will not hide mistakes from their managers or make co-workers scapegoats while making excuses. Rather they will identify what they did wrong and how it can be rectified in future. And the best way to check this ? One can ask them to describe a situation where he did wrong and what steps he took to correct the mistake. How did the tackle the situation. If they dis not own up to their mistake, then definitely he is not your right recruitment choice.

Respect –

Last but not least among desirable soft skills in a candidate is respect. A candidate who has self respect will always try to do their best in any situation as they would want to put their best foot forward. Having  respect for the team means they’re going to take mess ups personally; having respect for their manager means they’re not going to have a bad attitude about work. There are just so many benefits to having a candidate that exemplifies respect. At the same time, this might be the hardest soft skill to identify. Some key things to look out for: politeness, knowledge of the job, speaking kindly of their current or past jobs, just an overall good attitude about things.

If the candidate displays all these soft skills and they also have the cultural fit with the required hard skills for the particular job role then off course he is the one you are looking for.