In the labour market we hear more and more about a series of skills that do not concern training and professional skills, but the attitudes of one’s character and way of reasoning.
The correct term to identify these skills, as is known, is soft skills: an English term that translated literally means “soft skills” but which, in this capacity, does not tell us much about its true meaning. Yet it is a set of very important skills to successfully place oneself in the world of work, so today we will try to deepen the topic by explaining what they are and, above all, which of the existing ones are of greater appeal to companies.
What are soft skills?
The soft skills are skills strongly linked to the profile of our personality. The experience, contact and relational dynamics that develop with other people, as well as the experiences we live every day, are all sources of acquisition of soft skills. To define them clearly we could say that they are character characteristics, mental approaches or simple attitudes that, as a whole, contribute to describe us also in a professional key.
Precisely the breadth of this definition makes it difficult to codify exactly what soft skills are: they range from the ability to work in a team to stress management; from the ability to speak in public to empathy; from creativity to leadership, to emotional intelligence.
There is no standard and precise definition that frames the great hemisphere of soft skills precisely because each workplace could require different ones.
How can we prove them?
Usually companies interested in a candidate’s soft skills structure the selection in such a way that they can stand out on their own. In practice there are questions that give an idea of the way of reasoning of the candidates and that may sound “strange” or “unusual”. In reality, these are aimed at bringing out our way of reasoning and posing ourselves with respect to certain archetypal situations.
The same applies to group interviews, i.e. those that take place in the presence of other candidates where they are asked to solve a problematic situation while recruiters observe the behavior of all participants.
In these situations a whole series of aspects of our character emerge that go beyond what is our CV and recruiters can evaluate our attitudes of team spirit, leadership and influence of the opinions of others. That is why it is important to know our strengths and bring them out through sincere answers.
On the contrary, a forced and pre-set attitude would risk having the opposite effect, discouraging the recruiter to get to know us better. Soft-skills, therefore, are demonstrated with transparency and are skills that we can improve over time only when we reach a certain degree of awareness of who we are.
