Only 1 in 10 candidates with a matching CV also has a fitting soft skills profile. 9 in 10 employees leaving their company, leave because of soft skills mismatch. Still most companies do not screen for soft skills prior to the interview. Reduce your bad hires by implementing soft skills screening early in your recruitment process.
Research shows that 92% leave their jobs due to soft skills issues – not fitting their new role, organization, team or manager. Still, today’s focus in the recruitment process is on the CV requirements. This despite the wide spread “optimization” services being offered. Candidates can utilize CV templates, CV writing services, CV formatting services for a very low fee, delivering shiny CVs optimized for the job and the parsing algorithms. This is rapidly changing – the recruitment process is transforming towards a holistic approach including soft skills screening and assessing. This transformation is posing new challenges for the recruiting function, assessing soft skills is generally a demanding and time consuming task and is one of the major obstacles in the future of work for human resource departments.
Download softfactors’ whitepaper on softskills
Please provide your e-mail address below to download PDF
The typical applicant CV has a good hard skills match
Recruiting with softfactors recruiting suite, we have found that about 30% of candidates submit CVs which seem to fit the job hard skills requirements almost perfectly, but 90% of those candidates do not have the necessary soft skills to be long-term successful in that role or company. This problem is known in recruitment under the name “shiny CVs”. Sometimes these CVs almost seem to be a “copy” of the job description. The hard skill fit may seem very beneficial at first sight, but given that 92% of employees leaving their jobs due to mismatched soft skills, the hard skill only testing is insufficient. Various studies show that bad hires cost companies upwards of 30% of yearly salaries and that 20% of hires become bad hires. Therefore it is clear that soft skill assessment has to be an integral part of any recruitment process.
The future strong performers are found through soft skill assessment
Personality assessments are being used more and more frequently in the recruiting process to “measure” soft skills. Typically, soft skills are assessed by recruiters or psychologists during the interview or by digital solutions after the first interview. With suitable soft skill assessments the selection effectiveness in recruiting can be increased. Soft skill assessment also helps to reduce the most important obstacle for the candidate; the fear of an “unfair” recruitment process.
A special thanks to Sebastian Hälg who contributed with data analysis for this article.