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Top1. Introduction
Great businesses are built on having a strong workforce; the key essentials in any organization are the employees. These are the people who display exceptional skills and expertise and have potentials to perform and excel in their roles. However, finding the right people is the toughest job of recruitment officer. Often, they hire people for their hard or quantitative skills and very often overlook the importance of the soft or human skills that determine how the job gets down both inside and outside the organization.
Soft skills are as important as the hard skills. Soft skills are personal attributes that enhance a person’s job performance, interactions and career prospects. How well one interacts with others influences the success of his career. “If you want a job, have technical skills. If you want career, have people skills” (Goswami, 2013). Soft skills are essentially people’s skills or personality specific skills. According to Hewitt (2008), these are non-technical, intangible, personality specific skills that determines as individual’s strength as leader, listener and negotiator, or as a conflict mediator. Furthermore, soft skills are the traits and abilities of attitude and behavior rather than of knowledge or technical aptitude (Tobin, 2006).
Over 60% of hiring managers said that screening for soft skills is difficult. Potential employees can be interpreted many ways, but there are common soft skills and characteristics found among successful hires and high-potential people. The most important soft skills ranked in order of importance that hiring managers look for during interviews are adaptability, culture add, collaboration, leadership, growth potential, and prioritization. 69% of the hiring managers say adaptability is the most important soft skills they screen for (Abbot et. al, 2016).
Adaptability refers to the ability to adjust and accommodate to the changing and often unpredictable physical, interpersonal, cultural, and task environments. People who are adaptable are often describes as cognitively and temperamentally flexible, resilient, and hardy, actively accommodating and adjusting to uncertainty and ambiguity even under duress (National Academy of Science, 2019). In order for the company to stay competitive, they need to adapt to changing economy and business needs. That means they need employees who can adapt well (Abbot et. al, 2016).
Oftentimes, hiring managers assess someone’s potential by looking at their soft skills and unique perspective. Yet in an hour or less conversation, it’s really difficult to fully understand the person behind the profile. The good news is that behavioral interview questions are proven way to reveal person’s ability to collaborate, adapt, and more. By looking at their past behavior, you can more easily determine what someone will be like to work with (Abbot et. al. 2016). Hiring managers love behavioral interview questions because it’s their tool to evaluate soft skills (Malczyn, n.d.). In the behavioral interview, it is possible to reveal potential employee’s adaptability, culture add, collaboration, leadership, growth potential, and prioritization. In this study, the researcher will endeavor to reveal the adaptability profile of the respondents.