Soft skills and hard skills should be deployed in the correct proportions by brands that amazingly want to boost their marketing drive, unfortunately, however, this is not the case with most organizations. They tend to tilt more towards hard skills and this is their Achilles heel.
Soft skill is a personal trait that boosts situational consciousness and intensifies an individual’s capability to get a job accomplished. We use the term soft skills to encompass all those attributes that denote people’s skills or emotional intelligence.
They are quite different from hard skills, which are used to describe an individual’s technical know-how to carry out a specifically-defined assignment, soft skills are widely germane across job titles and industries. It does not boil down to overemphasizing the fact that with your hard skill prowess you can quite often land interviews but you definitely need soft skills to scale through the interview and also perform your duties effectively.
The fact that soft skills have been found to be very essential to boosting marketing drive has made a lot of business executives and leaders are to place a priority on these attributes when hiring employees. They have been found to be highly essential for the effectiveness of employees in any modern workplace.
LinkedIn reports that 57% of senior leaders believe that soft skills are more relevant than hard skills and went ahead to specify leadership, communication, collaboration, and time management as the topmost four in-demand soft skills. This shouldn’t come as a surprise since looking at their contributions to any brand, it’s evident that LinkedIn actually hit the nail on the shed.
The following are the ways each of the four contributes to the marketing drive of any brand:
1. Creativity
Technological advancements have made robots almost indispensable for the optimization and scaling of old ideas, but you can’t continue to dwell on old ideas. You need the services of creative employees who are innovative and can conceive the solutions of tomorrow.
2. Persuasion
It’s possible for you to come up with a killer product or service but the fact that you have this great product, a great platform or a great concept does not mean that people will fall head over heels to purchase your product. You still need employees with persuasive powers to convince your potential customers to purchase your product.
3. Collaboration
To effectively run your organization especially if you have the mindset of growing in this AI age, your employees must have collaboration as their watchword. Collaboration breeds harmony and understanding that your brand needs to stay competitive.
4. Adaptability
If your employees can’t adapt to the ever-changing marketing landscape, you are in for a very serious problem. Your competitors will bash you up and down and eventually send you packing.
5. Time Management
The old saying that time is money can’t be truer. If your employees are able to master the art of time management, you have been saved a lot of resources that would have otherwise been wasted.
A group like iCIMS Inc., which is known for the development of recruiting and another employee management-related software, carried out an analysis of its proprietary data and discovered that problem-solving, adaptability, and time management came tops among soft skills that recruiters always prioritize in candidates. Other important soft skills that land prospective employees the job they seek after include the ability to be diplomatic and respectful, especially at moments of disagreements.
Most demanded soft skills
If you are lucky to have some employees that have high levels of emotional intelligence as well as good communication skills and interpersonal skills, you will realize that a lot of difficult situations will be handled with ease. These employees will be in the position to be more articulate about their goals and also lead a team positively.
This scenario is very relevant and comes in handy where you have multimember, multidisciplinary teams that have geographical spread and/or are culturally dispersed. If your business has a customer service section, then strong soft skills will ensure you have a competitive advantage over others since you will be in the position to enhance a positive relationship between your customers and the organization without necessarily expending money to provide extensive training for your employees.
There are a lot of other soft skills that will open the door to any employment, take an employee to higher heights in the organization, and eventually translate to handsome ROI for the brand; here are some of them:
- creativity
- joviality
- self-confidence
- character and sincerity
- amiability
- ability to manage time effectively
- good manners
- passion
- optimism
- good listening skills
- attentiveness
- ability to have a broader view of things
- self-motivation
- common sense
- ability to make good decisions
- understanding for others’ frailties
- communication skills
- the mindset to see through a difficult job to the end
- to know when to change direction and call it quits if something isn’t working
- ability to barter
- resolving conflict harmoniously
Conclusion
Your business set up will definitely have a team working on one project or the other at one point in time and this is where you need soft skills because your employees will have to interact at different levels of the project. This becomes highly imperative taking into consideration that nerves are frayed from time to time.
While technical skills are necessary at this juncture, you can’t do without soft skills. In order to have your job done satisfactorily, you need skills such as collaboration, communication, problem-solving skills, and other emotional and cognitive capabilities to carry out tasks that will be multimember and multidisciplinary in nature.
