8 Surprising Soft Skills SMBs Want in New Hires

Recent data from ADP indicates that small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) are taking a much closer look at what specific soft skills job candidates bring to an interview than they are at technical skills.

According to a Market Pulse study of over 1,500 business owners and HR decision-makers, these are the top five soft skills that companies with under 50 employees want the most in new hires:

1. Strong work ethic (53%)
2. Problem solving (40%)
3. Detail-oriented (34%)
4. Self-starter (33%)
5. Time management (32%).

Compare that to the top five soft skills priorities at companies with 50-999 employees:

1. Strong work ethic (40%)
2. Ability to work on a team (40%)
3. Problem solving (39%)
4. Communication and interpersonal skills (37%)
5. Critical thinking (35%).

“If you have those behavioral capabilities, you actually can move throughout the organization because those foundational skills … provide you the opportunity to try new things and to learn new things. … So if you have that strong work ethic … to push through some failures and some successes … you gain experience that you can share,” commented Tina Wang, divisional vice president of human resources at ADP.

Wang credited the rising value of soft skills to the Great Resignation (because of the adaptability and willingness to continuously learn that was necessary for all those career changes that happened), as well as the normalization of remote work.

When co-workers are physically together only on certain days and frequently videoconferencing, soft skills that facilitate collaborative work become equally important to hard skills and industry expertise.

Recent Grads and Soft Skills

While work ethic is a key soft skill that surveyed companies of all sizes prioritize in new hires, it’s also one of the hardest skills to identify when recruiting. When asked “Which of the following skills, if any, do you have difficulty finding in new hires?” strong work ethic was the No. 1 response among both small and midsized business respondents.

“There are people out there who have [these skills]. It’s just being able to have the conversations to be able to figure out if that’s what [candidates] have foundationally. If you think about an interview with a [recent] college graduate, for example, how do they showcase that they have that strong work ethic and that they solve problems on their own?” Wang said. “You can always teach them how to answer a client call. … What’s harder to teach is the work ethic.”

What to Try Next

To attract soft skill-rich applicants, Wang suggested mentioning the kinds of behaviors you want to see in the job descriptions of your online postings (e.g., “go above and beyond your responsibilities,” “ability to proactively problem solve”) so that a new hire knows what they’re getting into.

To cultivate soft skills, ongoing timely feedback — along with appropriate recognition — will be important. “You can recognize when they do something great and you can share that recognition across the team so that everyone knows what great looks like,” she said. “It reinforces for them, ‘That is the work that is going to get me recognized. That is the work I need to continue doing.'”