Whatever stage you are at in your career, or the state of the job market, it can be tricky to know what employers value. There is a need – for both candidates and employers – to share the hard and soft skills they have, or value, for a role.
What hard skills do employers value?
A hard skill is something that is essential to doing the job in question. This can also include specific education, depending on the job level, or knowledge for the job. Other skills may include being able to demonstrate how you would tackle key tasks that form part of a role such as using accounting software for a financial role.
The hard skills employers value vary according to the role they are advertising. However, there can be core hard skills such as project management, IT skills, or people management skills that are valuable regardless of the job role. These can also be transferable across job type similar to soft skills and can also be supported by further education and formal skills.
What soft skills do employers value?
Soft skills, or interpersonal skills, are skills that support hard skills and enable you to perform the role better or work well with a wider team. It might be skills such as time management, active listening, general communication skills, critical thinking, networking or even professionalism. They are skills that are harder to quantify and demonstrate within a CV or application form.
What should the mix of skills be?
Whether you’re recruiting or applying for a role, it can be hard to successfully gather or provide enough information for both hard and soft skills. Whether it is through a CV or application form, there isn’t always enough room to demonstrate the value of both these sets of skills. A traditional recruitment process often sees employers focused on hard skills and this can lead to missing out on a ‘good egg’ depending on other skills that might benefit the wider team.
Surveys show that there isn’t a definitive answer in terms of mix of skills:
- ResumeGenius reports that 75% of managers want to see hard skills when recruiting for a technical role
- But also report that 48% of those hiring place importance on soft skills too
- LinkedIn reports that 73% of recruiters focus on skills-based hiring where candidates bring skills but also develop skills in the role for the future.
How can Good Egg Recruitment help?
We can help candidates and employers focus on the best mix of hard and soft skills for the roles they want. Our approach is always to find out as much as possible about employers and their objectives as well as those of the jobseeker. This enables us to show, to both, where added value from soft skills can be and how these can transfer to different types of roles to bring a benefit to an organisation.
At Good Egg Recruitment, we want to add more value than a traditional recruitment approach. Listening to businesses and potential employees helps us match the right set of skills to each opportunity. Why not get in touch with nicola@goodeggrecruitment.com or annette@goodeggrecruitment.com to find out more?