Soft skills are becoming increasingly important in today’s workplace, especially for frontline or key workers required at volume. Regardless of your industry, whether it’s retail, hospitality, healthcare, professional services, manufacturing, or IT and technology, the majority of your workforce needs to be able to work together effectively and handle customer interactions well. However, finding the right people with the right soft skills can be challenging, and that’s where Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) companies like Edwin Miller come in.

Why Soft Skills Matter in the Workplace

It’s easy to get caught up in the technical requirements of volume hiring, but hiring for soft skills is equally essential and can make or break productivity, collaboration, company culture, and customer satisfaction. Soft skills include those social skills that help people work together, including leadership, listening, critical thinking, teamwork, flexibility, adaptability, time management, and communication. Having a good mix of soft skills in your employees specifically contributes to:

• Improved Decision Making: When your employees can adapt to a given scenario at work, they can make better decisions that will benefit their individual projects or day-to-day activities.
• Better Communication: If your employees can communicate effectively, disagree respectfully, and constructively suggest improvements, they will be better able to work together and progress all business activities peacefully.
• Improved Customer Experiences: When your employees are good communicators, problem solvers, and flexible people, your customers will have a better experience when interacting with your business.
• Supporting a Healthy Working Environment: Employees who can communicate effectively make for a healthy work environment, free from toxic or manipulative behaviors.
• Improved Employee Retention: Soft skills contribute to people working well together, and when people work well together, they are less likely to look for other opportunities.

How to Measure Soft Skills in the Workplace

If you want to improve your workforce’s soft skills, you can deploy some simple techniques to assess the baseline of your current workforce’s soft skills. From there, you can identify any gaps that may need to be addressed in upskilling, training, or in your recruiting. Techniques to assess your current employees’ soft skills include:

• Self-Assessment Tools: Often in the form of surveys or questionnaires, self-assessments offer a unique insight into what your employees feel are their strengths and weaknesses. This is very useful as you can use their opinions to form the basis of your understanding and offset it with the way they communicate in the self-assessment as proof of those skills.
• Implementing 360 Feedback: Getting feedback from your management structures on your workforce, and vice versa from your workforce on your management teams, is a really useful way to understand what soft skills work well and which don’t.
• Employee Engagement Surveys: This is a good way to measure how effective your current soft skill hiring has been at creating the positive work environment you need. If your employees are engaged, then what you have already works, but if they are not engaged, then you need to address your current workforce’s soft skills.

How to Develop Soft Skills in the Workplace

Once you know what soft skills you need to develop in your existing workforce, you can create an internal training program for your teams. This can include a wide range of formats like seminars, conferences, and online workshops that are designed to emphasize those desirable soft skills and show people how they can use them in their day-to-day work.

How Can RPOs Evaluate Soft Skills During the Hiring Process?

RPOs can assess your high-volume recruiting needs against your business needs. This means seeing which soft skills would elevate your working culture and support better teamwork. They can then create custom hiring strategies that will bring

Ready to improve your workforce’s soft skills and take your business to the next level? Contact Edwin Miller today to learn how we can help you attract, assess, and hire top-tier talent with the soft skills you need to succeed. Our expert team is here to guide you every step of the way.