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How to Vet Candidates in the Post-Pandemic Job Market

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The unemployment rate has slowly been ticking downward as employers continue to rebound from the pandemic. Some industries are thriving, while others are preparing to ramp up their hiring efforts for the spring. But with a job market flooded with job seekers and workers looking to enter into pandemic-proof career paths, hiring managers have a ton of resumes to sift through. Ideally, these new additions to your team will stick around for the long haul and make a significant impact on your team. Thus, assessing a candidate’s fit is essential. If you are struggling to pin down the best talent this year, here is how to vet candidates in the post-pandemic job market.

Use a skills test

With an influx of job applications, utilizing skill assessments will help you identify candidates that will excel in the position. Although hard skills aren’t everything, your hiring team needs to know if a candidate can perform the basic functions of the job. These tests are not new, but they are an excellent method of highlighting each of your open positions’ best applicants. Skill assessments will help you weed out the least suitable candidates and streamline your hiring process. These tests are also helpful at discouraging the applicants that are spamming their resume in the post-pandemic job market.

Culture compatibility is crucial

Identifying candidates with the right skill sets is imperative, but culture compatibility is crucial for long-term success. You can teach almost any employee hard skills, new processes, and other details important for a particular role. However, you cannot train a new employee to fit your team dynamic. Behavioral interview questions can help your hiring team identify the candidates with the energy, passion, and work ethic that will make them successful. These questions will penetrate the surface-level assumptions you can make when initially interviewing candidates; they will also help you look beyond a candidate’s skills. These exercises are even more critical if you have a hybrid workforce with employees working both on-site and remotely.

Partner with a recruiting firm

Hiring suitable candidates for your team is no simple feat, and vetting candidates in the post-pandemic job market is even more challenging. Analyzing a candidate’s hard skills and culture compatibility will be essential moving forward. Although, performing these exercises can be time-consuming and difficult. If you need these job openings filled immediately, consider partnering with an external recruiting firm. The best recruiters will thoroughly vet candidates for their aptitude and fit before their resume even reaches your desk. At JSG, we meticulously vet each of our candidates to ensure they will mesh well with your team and make an immediate impact on your organization. Reach out to us today, and let’s work together to navigate the post-pandemic job market.

The Top Soft Skills You Need on Your Resume

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There’s been a lot of buzz about soft skills over the last couple of years. Employers are starting to pay more attention to them as it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find strong candidates in today’s market. Candidates with some of the hard skills hiring managers are looking for may not be available in this tight market. Thus, illustrating soft skills on your resume will help you stand out to employers.

Here are the top three soft skills and an example of how to demonstrate them in your resume.

Leadership

Even if the role you are applying for isn’t a leadership role, it’s essential to show examples of your leadership skills throughout your resume. Hiring managers want candidates that know how to take initiative, make tough decisions, and when necessary, navigate difficult situations. Showing off your leadership skills can also make you look attractive if this role has advancement where these skills will come in handy one day.

Example:

“Mentored my project management team on how to successfully adopt and utilize our new project scheduling software.”

Communication

Hiring managers are always looking through a resume to find candidates who possess great communication skills. And no, that doesn’t necessarily mean public speaking experience. Hiring managers want to ensure their next employee can clearly and effectively communicate with stakeholders, team members, and customers. Strong communication skills translate into excellent listening skills, attention to detail, and so many other desirable soft skills.

Example:

“Facilitated conversations between senior leadership and the quality control team to ensure everyone involved in our project was on the same page and aware of any potential quality issues.”

Adaptability

Adaptability is a soft skill that will be a HUGE asset to any team. Hiring managers want to find employees that are flexible and capable of successfully performing under changing environments. Just like in life, things happen in the workplace, and hiring managers want employees who can “roll with the punches.” This is especially true in fast-paced working environments when you have to think on your feet and adjust as challenges surface.

Example:

“Quickly learned how to proficiently use Adobe InDesign to help our marketing team develop brochures for our annual board meeting.”

What Are Soft Skills and Why Are They Important?

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soft skills

If you are on the market for a new job, you are not alone. With roughly 7.6 million job openings across the US, people are leaving their jobs for better opportunities every single day. If you’ve been browsing potential new careers, there’s no doubt you’ve seen employers express interest in “soft skills.” So what are soft skills are why do employers care about them so much?

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills are a mixture of social, people, and communication skills. Combined with your personality traits, they allow you to understand an environment and work well with those around you. They contrast with “hard skills,” which are typically more technical, specifically teachable, and can be defined or measured. Think of a person’s writing ability or familiarity with a software program.

Soft skills are intangible and usually unteachable, meaning you can’t sign up for a class to acquire them. Common examples include:

  • Critical Thinking
  • Leadership
  • Time Management
  • Emotional Intelligence
  • Problem-Solving
  • Adaptability

Why Are They So Important?

Soft skills are important because of their rarity. Not everyone has the ability to think critically, the same way not everyone knows how to create websites. But it is often easier to teach someone to use a program than it is to change the way they interpret a problem. For this reason, managers are sometimes forced to pick between candidates who possess hard skills or soft skills, but not both.

One person may be gifted in the technical areas of a job but isn’t a strong communicator. Another may lack experience in the technical disciplines, but has a track record for creative problem-solving and leadership experience. Often, the latter candidate is more attractive, as hiring either person comes with the expectation of them learning the skills they lack. Because hard skills are easier to teach, employers look to hire those who will ultimately be successful with the right training from leadership.

To illustrate this point, LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends 2019 report, 92% of talent professionals reported that soft skills are equally or more important to hire for than hard skills.

How Do I Showcase Them?

The challenging thing about soft skills is demonstrating you possess them. Anyone can say they are a good problem solver and adaptable on their resume, but how do you prove this? The best opportunity you may get is in your cover letter. Use the cover letter to tell a story that lets these intangibles shine through your background and experiences. Give specific examples of a project that was a success and connect it to a solution you devised.

This strategy is the same if you find yourself in an interview. List relevant experiences and connect your soft skills to why you were successful. If you can prove you have attained these skills, most hiring managers will be thrilled to speak with you!