When employers are hiring, they evaluate potential candidates’ hard and soft skills to make the most well-rounded hires. Hard skills are easier to identify than soft skills.
An employer, besides searching into a resume, also thinks of skills assessments to measure whether a candidate has the attributes to perform the job successfully. Hard skills are best assessed through certificates revision and/or binary tests that directly measure specific proficiency or have a right and wrong answer. Soft skills instead are better assessed through thoughtful interview questions that require candidates to pull from their personal experiences in the workplace.
Employers can use different tricks to assess soft skills, so for example looking at the wording used in the CV or using structured interviews based on a predefined list of interview questions, asking open-ended situational or behavioural questions.
Necessary to do this exercise:
Helpful to do this exercise:
Step 1 – If you were in an employers' shoes - would you hire you?
Complete the Worksheet - would you hire you? Focusing on soft skills.
To help yourself visualize your soft skills’ pattern report their “weight” on a radar diagram, then connect the dots with a line to get a star-representation of your soft skills. You can either draw the radar diagram on a piece of paper, print a template like this or this, or draw a radar diagram online customizing the items.
Step 2 – Employers soft skills assessment techniques
Go through the Infosheet - Employers soft skills assessment techniques and think of how you would answer to some of the interview questions listed there to train your ability to convincingly explain why you have a certain soft skill.
