In today’s post, I am going to share with you an important job interview tip. I have recruited for employers in the gaming, health care, airlines, insurance, manufacturing, IT and telecom industry. From all the thousands of job interviews I have conducted, I have observed that most often candidates are bypassed for their “soft skills” rather than their “hard skills”.
Hard skills include formal education, driving, typing and so forth. These are the traditional employment skills that are more easily learned and are typically observable.
Soft skills include interpersonal skills, conflict resolution, problem solving and so on. Traits like motivation, ethics and honesty. These employment skills are typically hard to learn and train for so wise employers understand these are the competencies to recruit. In job interviews, behavioral questions are used to assess soft skills (also the hiring manager can assess your body language for specific soft skills like interpersonal skills and so forth). For example, a typical behavioral interview question to assess a soft skill to assess ethics and interpersonal skills would be:
“Tell me about a time when you were aware that a fellow employee had broken a company policy. How did you handle this?”
Believe it or not, interview questions used to assess soft skills, like the one you see above that most candidates struggle to answer. I can’t tell you how many times, I have sat in the interview room with another hiring manager and witnessed a candidate stutter and stumble over this types of question. In contrary, most candidates handle the technical questions quite well. For example, a technical question for a internet help desk position might be:
“Describe an applet and it’s function on a website?”
So the next time you are going to a job interview it might be wise to prepare for the assessment of your soft skills. For some great tips on how to handle these types of employment interview questions and improve your overall job interview skills check out these employment articles. Also there are additional blogs posted related to job interviews.
For additional information regarding interviewing techniques we encourage you to take our job interview e-courses. The courses have been developed from a human resources perspective.
To view job interview e-course demos, click on the links below.
We wish you much luck and success in your career search.
