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A Better Way To Hire For Soft Skills
One of the biggest flaws in the hiring process — and believe you me, there are quite a few — is the soft skills issue.
What does that mean?
Well, most companies tend to hire for competence — which is logical on face, but competence is overrated. It’s especially overrated right because with the rise of “the tech stack” and “disruption,” business models change (the buzzword is “pivot”) a lot. So you end up hiring someone with 17 specific skills that you wanted, but two years later, those skills are completely useless because the base model is pivoted. “Oh God, now we need more data scientists! But all we have are these account managers!”
Second problem of all this: when you hire managers off competence, oftentimes you have a “brilliant jerk” issue. It’s a guy or woman who’s very competent in a specific skill set, right? But they have no soft skills. They barely listen. No idea how to criticize or take feedback. Not an iota of respect. This is actually somewhat normative in employee-manager relationships now, which is why engagement statistics are slipping.
Leadership is mostly about soft skills these days, I’d argue. (And if you’d have 1–2 bad bosses, you know this drill too.)
