Ukrainian IT professional Oleksa Mashchyts, an entrepreneur and founder of the QA Ukraine community of testers, told how HR once selected a candidate whose soft skills prevailed over hard skills. And this surprised him. The IT professional asked other IT professionals what they would do.
Ukrainian IT professional Oleksa Mashchyts, an entrepreneur and founder of the QA Ukraine community of testers, told how HR once selected a candidate whose soft skills prevailed over hard skills. And this surprised him. The IT professional asked other IT professionals what they would do.
«Hard skills are better when it comes to technical specialties, all other things being equal,» Oleksa Mashyts added .
The recruiter can choose candidates at his own discretion, but the reality is that in technical specialties, hard skills are critically important. You can talk all you want about the importance of communication, but if a person cannot solve problems, no amount of soft skills will help.
Furthermore, the very fact that a recruiter focuses on soft skills may not indicate a deep understanding of the job, but rather personal preferences or even incompetence. An inexperienced recruiter may well overestimate soft skills and underestimate technical expertise because they themselves do not understand the specifics.
As a result, if you hire someone only because of their soft skills, but without sufficient technical training, they will either have to be trained for a long time, or they will simply slow down the team’s work. On the other hand, a specialist with strong hard skills, even if not perfect in communication, will be able to bring real benefits, and interaction is a matter of time and experience.
So, all things being equal, you need to choose someone who is actually capable of doing their job, not someone who is just pleasant to talk to.
From my experience, I can say that I support the recruiter’s approach in this situation, because in my experience we have always hired a person for the company, not for the project. In such a situation, you no longer need a «husky who covers tasks» here and now, you need a person for long-term work. And I hired less courageous people, but with better software, because this allowed me to boost the person even more in half a year, rather than arguing with the skill «tree». But in conditions when you need someone only here and only now, focusing on the technical component makes sense.
A smart person can master new technologies quite quickly. But learning not to be an asshole is almost impossible.
Here it all depends on the requirements, as with solving technical problems. If the team needs a person to join the work with the appropriate technical skills, then you can consider a person who has — well, not terrible soft skills, but, for example, is closed and there are some nuances that can be worked with — in such a case, you can quite consider cooperation. The main thing is that you can work with the person. Because there are people with good technical skills that you never want to see in your team.
Let’s be honest, recruiters mostly select not by soft skills, but by acting skills. How do they find out if a person is responsible, for example? By how confidently they talk about their responsibility. And here’s the catch — often the most responsible people work with increased anxiety. How do you think an anxious person will look at an interview — confident or not very?
I wonder what soft skills were assessed. Because here they write about toxic people and the long-term perspective… But what if the conversation is about self-presentation, for example? Well, on the topic of toxic people. Often, narcissists and sociopaths know how to make a very good impression when it is needed. For some reason, no recruiter has yet given an answer as to how they recognize such candidates at an interview.
This question cannot be answered in a vacuum, because it all depends on the context, what responsibilities and tasks, what team, and soft skills are a very broad concept, and sometimes, conditionally poor soft skills can even be a plus if you take +/- technically identical candidates, when one is slightly stronger technically, and the other is much more pleasant in terms of software: communication, adequacy, intuitive perception, except in such a case, you can definitely make a choice in favor of software.
They will take the one who asks for less money.
If we take the terminal options from either a toxic asshole with skills or a communicative suffocating asshole, then I want to apply Escobar’s axiom. And with the average values, I think my choice would be towards soft skills, because the team is still working on the project and the synergy effect from working together will give a bigger boost than having one superstar.
What kind of vacancy are we talking about? How important is software in it? How much does it involve communication with other people? How difficult is it to acquire hardware and is there training as part of the vacancy? Because in one vacancy it may be quite justified, in another it is not logical at all.
If a person knows everything about energy and has good software skills, but is not very good at making promises, and there is the same person who makes promises but is somehow toxic in terms of skills, you are unlikely to teach a person how to make promises in «half» a year, but you will not be able to work with an asshole for half a year.
It depends a lot on the situation and the specific team. And it often happens that it is during the technical interview that they also pay attention to software. When a candidate knows everything perfectly, even worked on a similar project, but the technical team understands that despite this, it will be difficult to work together (difference in temperament, talking too much or too little, and many other parameters). And as a rule, a recruiter can also reveal these points during his interview, if there is complete trust and interaction with the team where they are hiring — and here it is not at all about intuition, but about real requirements. At the same time, it is possible that if this particular candidate were going to another team, they would pay attention to other points. That is why it happens that the candidate thinks that everything went perfectly (and so it was), but there are certain «buts» that they will not talk about out loud, but will take into account when hiring.
