We had surveyed over 100 recruiters and hiring experts to find out what skills employers and companies look for in Year 2021. Here’s a excellent articles that shows most in-demand skills on the market.
What skills do employers look for in candidates? It’s the ultimate question for many job seekers and poses a real challenge both when writing your resume and during the recruitment process. After all, what skill set is most important when choosing a candidate? How do employers verify your skills, and do they actually read that carefully curated skills list on your resume?
What Job Skills Are Most Important?
Let’s start with the big one. Which skill set is most important to employers when choosing a candidate. Soft skills or hard skills?
But before you get the answer, a brief explanation. Soft skills are a broad set of transferable skills that are mainly related to the way you work with other people. They include social skills, communication skills, emotional skills, and people skills. They’re also tough to teach and difficult to measure.
Hard skills by contrast are easy to teach and measure. They consist of abilities that are often job specific and can be more easily obtained through formal education and training. A few examples include technical skills, computer skills and language skills.
And the winner? Soft skills were the clear favorite, with a full 61% of respondents considering them of paramount importance over hard skills.
This makes perfect sense. Working with others is a crucial part of virtually every job in every industry. Whether it’s colleagues or customers, it’s essential to be able to effectively navigate the complexities of human interaction.
Our findings are backed up by other studies too. LinkedIn’s 2019 Global Talent Trends report found an even bigger preference for soft skills. 92% of hiring managers surveyed said that soft skills are as important, or more important, than hard skills.
And a study published in the International Journal of Applied Management and Technology revealed soft skills to be of “paramount importance” for the global work environment. So though these skills are considered soft, you’ll have a hard time succeeding in the workplace without them.
Now let’s dig a little deeper.
No surprises here, teamwork tops the list followed closely by communication skills. In both cases, more than half of our respondents considered these to be important soft skills. To deliver the very best results for your employer you have to work effectively with your colleagues. And whether it’s between colleagues, or with clients, you have to be able to communicate effectively too.
Interestingly, though they’re in high demand, these soft skills were also cited as being among those most often missing from candidates’ resumes.