Soft skills and respect: the secret to success

Your workplace culture is more important to the success of your business than you may realise. Among the stories making the headlines for recruiters this week were reports into the significance of respect and how soft skills will matter most for tomorrow’s recruits.

Improve your work-life balance: expert advice for recruiters

The world of recruitment is still seen as one of high stress and unsociable hours, according to a leading industry figure. Henry Keeys, Director of ISL Recruitment, told the news portal Recruitment Grapevine this week that cultivating a positive office environment was essential for recruiters – if they are to improve their image and retain key workers.

The recruitment industry is seen as being driven by arbitrary Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and top-down control; where pressure – not praise – is considered the most effective form of motivation. But Mr Keeys believes that the authoritarian approach does more harm than good.

The Bristol-based ISL is celebrating being named among the best places to work in Britain and, for Mr Keeys, the secret to success is mutual respect. He says businesses that respect employees – and listen to their problems as well as their ideas – are the ones who retain key staff in the long term.

ISL’s internal culture believes it is often the smaller considerations that foster a culture of success: from flexible hours, to enabling remote working; to picking a better quality coffee for morning breaks. That is one suggestion that eBoss can get on board with.

Has the traditional CV become a thing of the past?

Beyond coffee, another passion here at eBoss is CVs. More specifically, we make it our business to improve how recruiters use CVs to match skilled candidates with business clients. So we were more than a little concerned when one developer stated this week that CVs were becoming obsolete.

That is the opinion of Charlie Taylor, the developer behind the new mobile app for careers, Debut. ”CVs are part of an analogue, restricted world. And the world we’re living in is a digital, unlimited one,” Mr Taylor told Business Insider. The app instead connects employers with candidates, and allows members to offer reviews of potential employees – providing an ongong assessment that, it is hoped, will generate more positive experiences and more precise outcomes than the traditional written resumé or face-to-face interview.

While developing recruitment software, we have seen new technologies emerge to address old problems: like semantic search tools and automated candidate tracking facilities to improve search results. We have certainly seen a more modern approach being adopted by the recruitment industry in recent years. But will software solutions really spell the end of the humble CV?

Probably not. But, with nearly a half of Brits (48%) saying they struggle to create a satisfactory CV, we think that software solutions may have more to offer recruitment than perhaps many would realise.

Soft skills will be the key to Australian employment

Interpersonal skills, problem-solving, and communication expertise will be among the most valuable qualities in Australia’s future employment market, one educational consultant has said this week.

The report commissioned by Deakin Co and carried out by Deloitte Access Economics, sought to evaluate the impact of these hard-to-quantify skills in the nation’s workforce. It found that, by the year 2030, as much as 63 per cent of the total jobs market could be made up of positions that rely on these abilities. ”Soft skills” tend to be a candidate’s capacity to connect with colleagues and clients, adapt to new objectives and technologies, as well as openness and optimism for creating positive outcomes.

John O’Mahony, who wrote the report, said that the value of soft skills should not be overlooked: ”Soft skills will become the new job currency. Employees with soft skills could increase business revenue by over $90,000”.

Mr O’Mahony said that it was the responsibility of recruiters, educators and employers to cultivate soft skills in the next generation of young professionals. ”It is essential for businesses to invest in developing soft skills, to future-proof their operations.”