How AI is Helping HR Teams Identify Soft Skills
Illustration: © AI For All
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has presented us with two opposing narratives: it will either replace human workers entirely or change the way we work for the better. Even those who believe the latter likely have questions about what work will look like and how humans and machines can collaborate on tasks that are not so straightforward. The good news? Our future will be determined by how we choose to integrate this technology.
If we do it right, AI will help us remain a vital force in the workplace and become better versions of ourselves. In other words, AI may even have the power to bring out the more human side of us all. If done wrong? It’s still too early to say if AI will ever take over human jobs completely, but more likely, we won’t tap its full potential. This will leave workers overburdened and frustrated, and businesses with a huge and costly missed opportunity.
AI advancements are happening in tandem with some interesting shifts in HR, which makes for exciting new developments in the workforce. The first that comes to mind is the move from prioritizing traditional hard skills to increasingly valued soft skills. Fortunately, AI can assist in not only identifying, but amplifying these essential but harder to pinpoint soft skills. This has the potential to improve work environments, employee satisfaction, and foster better integration between human efforts and AI capabilities.
The Tricky Side of Evaluating Soft Skills
Unlike hard skills—accounting, copywriting, computer literacy, etc.—that can easily be carried out by AI, soft skills are trickier to identify and tie into job requirements. Soft skills can also be subjective, often being viewed through pre-existing biases, void from personal characteristics that actually drive success. AI can help mitigate this by pairing people with jobs where their soft skills will help them be more successful and productive in their roles.
Organizations already have the data AI needs from existing employees to help identify the soft skills that are important for their jobs. This includes inputs such as personal attributes, job success metrics, retention, satisfaction, and engagement, as well as feedback about what’s seen as important to succeed in each job.
Another advantage of leveraging AI for soft skills-based hiring is that it’s universal. This means employers can evaluate candidates for any number of jobs at the same time, and the candidates can apply for any number of jobs at the same time, streamlining the entire application process and evaluating high-quality candidates who otherwise may have gone elsewhere.
How AI Helps Soft Skills Shine
Here are three applications of AI in HR uncovering important soft skills in candidates through the employee lifecycle:
1. Enhancing and Expediting the Interview Process
We know a candidate’s worth and experience can’t be summed up solely in a resume or cover letter. On the other hand, lying—or to put it more kindly, positively inflating resumes—is not an uncommon practice. But perhaps the most glaring deficiency is that resumes and cover letters simply aren’t designed to highlight soft skills. While professional sites, like LinkedIn, have helped bring more personality—and validation—to recruiting, it’s still just a glance at who the candidate is.
Most companies use machine learning to select candidates based on hard-skills-based keywords related to a role. But there are far more strategic applications of AI for candidate screening. It’s why 1:1 video interviews are so crucial to the hiring process. Not only can AI be used for tasks like scheduling interviews and cross-checking information and references, but it can be trained to pick up on soft skills most important to the job, average interview scores, and compare those scores to other candidates.
2. Predicting Long-Term Success
It’s possible to fake hard skills to meet the technical requirements of a given job. It’s much more challenging to fake soft skills, such as good communication and strategic thinking. Since those skills are harder to train, they’re more important to hire for—you can teach someone how to use software, but it’s much more difficult to teach them to cooperate and collaborate effectively.
AI can help HR leaders spot those specific soft skills and correlate them to match the right candidate with the right role. Using this data, not only can certain AI models match candidates, but predict success and longevity in that role, so HR isn’t hunting for new talent just months or a year down the line. While hard skills are still important, put more weight on soft skills and consider relying more heavily on AI to provide those insights.
3. Creating a Culture of Growth and Development
41% of people in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, and Singapore said a lack of prospects for upward mobility was the main reason they had resigned from a job (World Economic Forum). Another survey found 78% of respondents were frustrated due to experiencing challenges trying to advance their careers. If our teams are our strongest business asset—and they are—why are we making it so hard for them to move up?
Growth and development is important in any career, but often, HR teams lack the visibility and time to assess their own talent pool. Especially if employees aren’t actively searching for opportunities within. AI can use existing data about employees and open roles to match candidates—based on both soft and hard skills—to ensure their existing team members aren’t being overlooked. This not only widens the talent pool for HR leaders, but helps prioritize internal mobility to drive employee loyalty and fulfillment.
AI is evolving, and with it, the potential to affect the HR field in a meaningful way. But to bring it full circle, it all depends on how we choose to implement it. Businesses would be wise to evaluate the skills—ideally with a focus on soft skills—most important for job roles and invest in software or data scientists who can help identify the candidates who embody these characteristics, whether in or outside your organization.
AI for Work
Human Resources
Author
Founder and CEO of Cangrade. An accomplished technologist and entrepreneur who led the engineering group at Webdialogs, a provider of online meeting and communication solutions acquired by IBM. Following the acquisition, Gershon acted as Chief Software Architect in the Lotus group of IBM, delivering LotusLive (now known as IBM SmartCloud), a cloud-based collaboration suite. After IBM, Gershon was involved in a number of ventures but decided to focus on Cangrade’s mission of leveling the playing field for job seekers.
Author
Founder and CEO of Cangrade. An accomplished technologist and entrepreneur who led the engineering group at Webdialogs, a provider of online meeting and communication solutions acquired by IBM. Following the acquisition, Gershon acted as Chief Software Architect in the Lotus group of IBM, delivering LotusLive (now known as IBM SmartCloud), a cloud-based collaboration suite. After IBM, Gershon was involved in a number of ventures but decided to focus on Cangrade’s mission of leveling the playing field for job seekers.
