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Much résumé advice and job interview prep centers on highlighting your tangibles — your hard skills, your certifications, your project outcomes, your deliverables. Just about anything you can stick a number or percentage on.
While focusing on more concrete skills, soft skills can get left out of the conversation. But they shouldn’t be, said Irmgard Naudin ten Cate, EY’s global talent attraction and acquisition leader.
Soft skills can be particularly useful for new graduates and young professionals who are starting their careers and working toward technical mastery in their fields. Wherever you are in your career, anyone who’s ever worked with other people likely knows the value of soft skills in navigating, well, human nature.
Naudin ten Cate told Business Insider she looks for three soft skills in particular in job applicants.
The first is curiosity.
“It’s always so important that you are constantly learning,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be that static learning that we always did [in school] but making sure that you add a new skill as you go on.”
Another soft skill she sees as key is adaptability.
“Being able to adapt to change, whether that is a digital change or otherwise, where we find ourselves in different situations, is really key,” she said. “Like they say, ‘Change is the new normal.'”
The third is about wielding influence. This involves balancing various people’s needs and wants to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.
“Negotiation, we often think, is like a commercial exchange, but negotiation happens in discussions where you have to work with someone and get a point across,” said Naudin ten Cate. “A lot of people do this all the time, but they might not recognize it necessarily as negotiation or influencing.”
“For me, it’s that brokering — what does the other person need and how we can get to that same kind of outcome?” she added. It’s about “making sure that you listen to someone and also keep in mind the goal that you’re trying to get to.”
You could illustrate this third soft skill, for example, with an anecdote about how you influenced the outcome on a teamwide project or how you came to a resolution or conclusion in a situation where someone disagreed with you, she said.
For all of these traits, it’s important you show they’re transferable skills and “articulate to your future employers what that looks like for your success,” Naudin ten Cate said.
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