In the blog this week, we shall continue our focus on the recruitment stage of the graduate job application process by evaluating the importance of highlighting soft skills.
The reason why employers prioritise soft skills
As the number of graduates applying for job vacancies or internships of various kinds has ballooned, prospective employers now increasingly focus on soft rather than hard skill information such as qualifications. It is assumed that the applicants have the basic required qualifications before applying for the post, but so do huge numbers of other graduates.
How to identify and prioritise key soft skills
To identify the key soft skills required by a particular organisation, it is essential to critically evaluate documents such as the person specification and the publicity materials produced for marketing. Do not just focus on the language, but also scan the images provided. For example, do these images seem to suggest a more formal or informal work context and do people appear to be working in teams or more individually? The trick is to then prioritise reporting your soft skills to match the specific organisational context.
In relation to the first employment following graduation, it is important to note that soft skills acquired at university are primarily cultivated during participation in extracurricular activities. Therefore, briefly highlight the activities in which you participated and how they helped you to develop specific soft skills. Again, you need to provide the context in which the skill was learnt together with the importance of the ability in relation to the job application, not just list terms such as ‘teamworking’, ‘cooperating’, and ‘leadership’.
Extracurricular activities include sport clubs, student societies, students’ union, university committees, volunteering, part-time jobs, and entrepreneurship.
Question 1
Why do employers prioritise soft skills in graduate job applications?
Question 2
Where else might students at university acquire soft skills in addition to extracurricular activities?
Question 3
What are the key differences between writing in an academic or professional business style?
We shall examine Question 3 in the blog next week.
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