Tell a Soft Skills Career Story in Your Next Job Interview
What makes for a great job interview? You know, one of those interviews that makes you say, “I totally nailed it. I know I’ve got the job. It’s time for a happy dance!”
Well, for one, it’s not about reciting your resume word-for-word like some sort of business robot (even if “the robot” is a fantastic choice for a happy dance). Instead, it’s about going beyond the resume to bring the story of your career to life. Then, taking that story a step further to connect your future to the goals of the employer.
The best storytellers don’t just list off events in the order in which they occurred. Instead, they draw the audience in by sharing the unique qualities of each character. In that same way, it’s time to transform your next job interview into an engaging story of what makes you unique as a candidate! To get there, you’ll have to shift the focus from a rehashing of professional milestones to what truly sets you apart — your soft skills!
Chapter 1: Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills
First and foremost, let’s lay out the difference between hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills, also commonly referred to as technical skills, are straightforward requirements for a position that employers can easily check off of a list. Does this applicant have the necessary degree? Did they complete training in this particular area? How many years of experience do they have in the industry?
Hard skills may be a prerequisite for getting your foot in the door, but soft skills are the key to unlocking the full power of your career story. These are the skills that touch on the less tangible elements of the way we work together. Soft skills bring to mind things like communication, leadership and teamwork. In other words, the elements of a great story!
Chapter 2: Identifying Your Soft Skills
If job interviews are all about storytelling, then every job candidate needs to build a narrative with a compelling beginning, middle and end. To start telling your story, think back to previous experiences in your work, education and outside activity history. What made you successful during those experiences? When did you fall short and why? What are you hoping to improve upon as you turn the page to a new chapter in your career?
As a starting point, consider using your resume as a reference. Then, begin writing out these key career moments from memory with soft skills as your focus, going beyond the bullet points to fill in the rich details. Unfortunately, our memories can only tell ourselves and our audiences so much about the way we interact with others in professional settings. In order to go deeper when identifying your soft skills, consider taking an assessment backed by science — like MyPrint®! Supporting anecdotal evidence from your career and experiences with tools built on data-driven people analytics can add credibility to your claims.
Chapter 3: Putting Soft Skills in Action During Questioning
Once you start seeing the job interview process through the lense soft skills, you’ll notice how many of the most common and difficult questions can be easily answered with soft skills in mind.
Here are five of the most common job interview questions, as well as the areas of soft skills employers are look for in your response:
- Can you tell me about a time when you overcame a significant challenge at work?
- What happens when you have multiple deadlines and how do you prioritize?
- Give me an example of when you had to work closely with someone who was difficult to get along with. How did you handle interacting with that person?
- Can you tell me about a time when you had to ask for help?
- What is your preferred management style?
When you answer questions like these, answer with your soft skills! If you are unsure what your strengths are, look at your MyPrint One Pager. What are your top three personality strengths? For example, if you are Empathetic, you might excel working with difficult people because you can put yourself in their shoes and understand why they behave in certain ways. If you are Easy-Going and know that details aren’t your forte, you might be more inclined to reach out to a detail-oriented colleague when you have projects that require precision. The more concrete the example you can share, the better!
Writing an Ending with Confidence
It’s a tale as old as time — the job candidate makes it to the end of the job interview journey only to feel like they missed out on a golden opportunity. One way to avoid this tragic fate is to turn your job interview into a story about soft skills! Prepare for your next meeting with a potential employer by thinking about your career as chapters, each highlighted by the traits that make you unique.
Are you looking to turn your next job interview into the story of your soft skills? Click here to take MyPrint and receive a detailed assessment of your unique personality, motivational and behavioral traits!
The Soft Skills Resume is Here to Transform Your Boring Job Search
Resumes are boring! There, I said it. Job seekers know it. Hiring managers know it. Heck, the entire working world knows it! Why, then, are we all creating the same, cookie-cutter resumes over and over again expecting different results?
Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way anymore. Toss out that boring, black-and-white career document and say hello to the soft skills resume!
Why Soft Skills?
First things first, let’s sort out why soft skills are so important in today’s hiring landscape. Years ago, the conventional wisdom was that finding a job was a straight-forward process. Either you had the skills to do the job or you didn’t, simple as that! This way of thinking only accounted for technical skills, also known as hard skills. Think of hard skills as the nuts and bolts of how to do the functions of a job that a person could learn through formal education. For example, before a doctor practices medicine, they should definitely go to medical school first.
Soft skills, on the other hand, relate to the unique ways we connect to one another while we work. Examples include communication, leadership and teamwork. While hard skills like education and previous work experience might help you book a job interview, it’s actually soft skills that will ultimately help you land the job.
Unfortunately, identifying soft skills remains a challenge for everyone involved in the job search. In fact, a recent survey from LinkedIn found that while nearly 75% of job seekers polled feel it’s important to highlight their soft skills, the same percentage of hiring managers believe a standard resume is insufficient in evaluating a candidate’s soft skills. Clearly, both sides of the interview table need to find a new way to communicate with each other.
Identifying Your Soft Skills
Soft skill-focused resume writing requires self reflection. To get started, think back to previous work or education experiences and consider the things that made you successful in what you did. Was it your ability to communicate with your peers that set you apart? Did you rely on a knack for scheduling and organizing your day? Maybe you’re a pro at paying attention to all of the details or you found a way to adapt and be flexible when situations changed. The moments of preparation and execution that stand out in these memories are probably going to be your soft skill strengths!
However, the pictures in our minds can only tell a small portion of the soft skills story. To go deeper when identifying what makes you unique, consider taking an assessment backed by science — like MyPrint®! Supporting anecdotal evidence from your career and experiences with tools built on people analytics and strong data can add weight and credibility to your claims.
Creating Your Soft Skills Resume
Once your soft skills are identified, it’s time to transform your resume by making them the stars of the show. This can be accomplished with two key changes to the typical resume format: creating a separate “Skills” section and sprinkling soft skills throughout the rest of your resume.
- Skills Section: At this point in your jobs search, you’ve most likely come across templates for standard resumes that include flashy sections for education and work experience. It’s time to set aside an equal amount of space for a section dedicated to your skills — both hard and soft. To build out this section, start with an exhaustive list of all of your skills. Then, add or remove the skills that best apply to the particular job opportunity.
- Sprinkle Skills Throughout: While facts and figures will provide powerful takeaways in the work experience and education sections of your resume, soft skills can add depth to these areas as well! For example, instead of leaving a bullet point of information feeling cold without context, like, “Compiled spreadsheets for 6 accounts” add a bit of soft skill spice by rephrasing the same bullet point this way, “Applied detailed-orientated thinking during data entry across 6 key accounts.”
Let’s face it, the old days of boring resumes are rapidly falling to the wayside. Today, job seekers and employers alike are putting a premium on tapping into what makes a workplace unique. The best way to highlight your true self in the limited space of a resume is to transform it into a document that puts soft skills front and center!
Do you need more help turning your resume into a showcase of your soft skills? Check out our recent blog post on steps for infusing your MyPrint results directly into your resume!