Identify Recruiter Expectations
Recruiters are increasingly interested in behavioral skills and want to recruit transversal, flexible, independent, and creative professionals.
"No matter your qualifications, whether you're an engineer, a salesperson or marketer, if you don’t have a foundation of soft skills, you will fail. And you need the right soft skills, because there are so many. “ - Dr. Tomas Chamorro Premuzic, Chief
So then what are these sought-after soft skills?
In 2019, LinkedIn published an analysis of the most in-demand skills in this article. The top five are:
Creativity
Persuasion
Collaboration
Adaptability
Emotional intelligence
Go Behind the Recruitment Scenes at Algolia
Algolia, a tech company, was created in 2012 in France. It helps businesses across industries quickly create relevant, scalable, and lightning-fast search and discovery experiences.
Here's a summary of an interview we had with Clothilde Maurer, who works on the recruitment team at Algolia. We asked her the following questions:
In your opinion, what are the greatest challenges in today's professional world?
Many challenges came up to the surface with the COVID-19 crisis. For instance, how can you be productive when you're emotionally involved? How can you work entirely remotely? How can you communicate efficiently using online tools?
Adaptability: No matter which organization you would like to work for, you need to adapt. For instance, at Algolia, the organization keeps growing, so you always have to create new collaborations to tackle new challenges.
Overexposure to information: We expect candidates to be well informed about the company they are applying to.
What are the soft skills you mostly look for?
Recruiting candidates with strong, soft skills is vital to Algolia. We assess four dimensions during the recruitment process: the job fit, the values, ownership, adaptability and sharpness.
1. The job fit: The technical skills (hard skills) necessary to perform the job.
2. Values: Algolia has five values. During the recruitment process, we dedicate one full day to evaluating them.
Care
Trust
Candor
Humility
Grit
3. Ownership.
4. Adaptability, sharpness.
How do you assess soft skills?
To assess soft skills, we may ask behavioral questions about situations that the candidate has experienced.
Here are some examples of behavioral questions asked in the interviews at Algolia.
"Tell me about a time when you had to delegate your work to a colleague or classmate: How did you prepare for it? How did you feel about entrusting your work to someone?" These questions assess your ability to trust others, plan, and organize yourself.
"Tell me about a loved one or coworker who has a skill that you don't have. How would you use this skill if you had it?" This question assesses humility and the ability to recognize strengths in others.
The best way to prepare for an interview is to identify concrete, real-life examples in which you've used your soft skills.
Algolia isn't the only company that has noticed the value of soft skills in their recruits. More companies are putting a focus on assessing soft skills in their recruitment process. We interviewed Fabiana Giorgi, from Gartner TalentNueron, to get another perspective on the role soft skills play in the recruitment process.
Let's Recap!
In this chapter, you discovered that:
Recruiters value soft skills more and more.
You can improve the soft skills you already have by identifying concrete situations in which you've used them.
By now, you understand the relevance of soft skills in the work world. However, it's still important to keep hard skills in mind. You'll see why in the next chapter.
