It’s all very well to say ‘Put soft skills at the heart of your hiring process’ but sometimes people need a little help knowing what to do and where to start. Here are our top tips to help you really make a success of using soft skills analytics in your hiring process:
1. Take the time to really think about what you need at the beginning of the process
Decide what kind of personality, skills and person you need. This will help you know what to look for and will help the candidates know if they should apply or not. Some organisations have hundreds of people applying for just one job, but the job descriptions can be so misleading and unclear that many of the people applying are not right for the vacancy. This can lead to wasted hours sifting through CVs and running tests, all because someone didn’t set the right profile.
2. Highlight those soft skills when designing the job description and advert
Make it clear what you are looking for. Ensure candidates can see what kind of personality is needed and what competencies are needed.
3. Don’t just look at ‘the here and now’ in terms of skills
Look at a person’s potential – do they have the right soft skills (good motivation, initiative and communication skills, for example) so that they can grow into a role?
4. Think about how the candidate will fit, personality wise, with the rest of the team
Do they fit well to their future manager? Will they make a good cultural fit in the organisation? These are important questions and if you have three great candidates, how they will fit in with their colleagues and boss could be the deciding factor.
5. Really look at the candidates
Don’t just look at what you want and need. Always keep in mind that there’s a person on the other side. Employer branding is so critical these days and making sure candidates have a good experience, whether they get the job or not, is an important part of that.
6. Be more human than resources
Technology should allow you to have more time to devote to what is most precious and important so have systems in place that help you to focus on the human stuff, rather than just processes. HR has become far too process-driven: onboarding people, processing CVs, etc. Let systems do this because they actually do it better than humans can. Then HR can focus on the human side of HR instead. We still need quality interviews, for example.
7. Make interviewing people who are not a good fit something of the past
With Softfactors you should only be interviewing people who are a good fit. This reduces the amount of time spent interviewing.
8. Give candidates feedback about their fit
This is part of ensuring there is a good candidate experience. With the Softfactors recruiting suite, candidates receive instantaneous online feedback about how the test went.
9. Combine data with gut feeling at interview
Don’t rely on just one, but both together – data and gut feeling. At the end of the day, it’s a person to person thing.
10. Use the information you have gathered
Don’t let it just go to waste once the hiring decision is made. People development can start with hiring. Softfactors highlights a person’s gaps, their strengths and weaknesses. This enables organisations to formulate development plans for new hires at the very beginning of the employer-employee journey.
Click here to register for your free copy of our soft skills whitepaper and find out how to transform your hiring success.