5 Soft Skills to Highlight in a Job Interview
Want to stand out in your next job interview?
Saying you’re proficient with certain soft skills won’t land you the job. You should instead highlight them with proper examples.
The examples you provide should contain a problem, the solution you were able to outline, and the desired outcome.
Critical Thinking
Represents your capacity to analyze a situation and provide a solution that might solve or enhance such a situation. Here’s how to express it:
“I analyzed customer complaint data and based on the insights I presented a suitable training session for new employees. After a year the complaints volumes decreased by 35%.”
Adaptability
Even assembly lines require adaptability. If a product becomes jammed in the machine, you should be able to step out of your mechanical movement and solve the issue at hand: Take this example:
“Since our company had clients from various cultural environments, as a marketer I had to maintain an open mind and constantly adapt our communications strategy in order to respect our clients’ costumes and make our projects clearer to them.”
Teamwork
Might seem cliche, but hiring managers do value this one. It demonstrates your social persona and allows them to understand how’d you interact with your new colleagues. Here’s how you could express it:
“When we were approaching a deadline, I suggested a revaluation of our priorities and encouraged joint effort in the tasks at hand. Not only we were able to deliver the project on time, but also were able to enjoy each milestone.”
Communication
It has a bigger impact when saying how you delivered bad news in former experiences because it places you in a center of a bad beginning and launches you to a very positive ending. Try this:
“I had to tell the team that we were losing a long-time client, due to its financial restraints. Since it was a challenging yet rewarding project, I knew the team would be disappointed with our loss. I made sure to acknowledge how they felt and asked them for ideas of similar projects we could pursue. They appreciated that and morale didn't drop.”
Problem-solving
This is almost unnecessary to outline since by talking about any other of the above, you’ll already be showing to the hiring manager your problem-solving capabilities. Nonetheless, here’s an example:
“The company was failing in providing valuable customer support. I design a new strategy more focused on the customer’s interest, which ended up getting us a better experience to our customers.”
Inspired by a fellow creator, I decided to challenge myself to publish 100 short-form articles within January. This is article number 23.
