Soft skills are personality traits and characteristics such as teamwork, time management and communication. Many soft skills – such as empathy and emotional intelligence – are also linked to positive outcomes in the professional world. Leaders who have high emotional intelligence, for example, experience higher job satisfaction, higher employee engagement, and better mental and physical health, according to psychologist and author Dr Daniel Goleman.

When you’re writing a job description or designing an interview scorecard, it can be helpful to outline the soft skills that will help someone be successful in a role. Will the role involve writing, whether in the form of emails, reports or blog content? Is it important for this person to speak with others or share information via presentations? In these cases, you’d want to list “communication” as a soft skill that’s required for the role. Will the role involve collaborating with others in order to share problems, brainstorm solutions and distribute tasks? In those cases, you’d probably want to include “teamwork” on your list of required soft skills.

What are the 7 soft skills?

There’s no single, definitive list of soft skills – you’ll always want to think about what success looks like for the specific role you’re hiring for and define your desired soft skills based on those criteria. However, there are seven common soft skills that you’re likely to want to include in your job descriptions and interview scorecards: communication, teamwork, problem-solving, time management, critical thinking, decision-making and leadership. Let’s look at each one in a bit more detail.

1. Communication

If a role requires writing, speaking or a combination of both, it makes sense to list communication as a required soft skill. This is especially important for outward-facing roles such as sales and customer success or for leaders who need to communicate company goals and guidance to their direct reports or share information with external parties such as investors or boards of directors.

2. Teamwork

If a role requires working closely with others, whether it involves sharing information or resources or coming up with solutions together, you will probably want to list teamwork as a required soft skill.

3. Problem-solving

Will someone need to make important decisions about how to prioritise projects or what steps to take with limited time and resources? Or perhaps their role involves navigating new situations on a regular basis? If the answer to these questions is yes – especially when the person is expected to make decisions autonomously – it makes sense to list problem-solving as an essential soft skill.

4. Time management

Does this role require regularly meeting deadlines or balancing many tasks at the same time? Are there serious consequences when this person falls behind schedule? In these cases, you would likely list time management as a required soft skill.

5. Critical thinking

We’re now exposed to more information than ever, but information is not the same as knowledge. If a role requires the ability to weigh different data points or qualitative information and make recommendations or take action accordingly, you may want to list critical thinking as a required soft skill.

6. Decision-making

If someone is responsible for deciding how to allocate budget or resources, which projects to prioritise, or which direction to pursue (either in terms of research or new business development), decision-making is likely an essential soft skill for that role.

7. Leadership

Leadership is an important soft skill for managers, but it’s also valuable for any role where it’s important to influence, inspire, motivate or coach others. For example, product managers often don’t have any direct reports, but their job often involves getting co-workers from other teams to buy into their strategy and vision.

Soft skills vs hard skills

The term “soft skills” is often used in contrast with “hard skills”. While hard skills are technical capabilities such as certifications, knowledge of a coding language or the ability to use specific software, soft skills are personality traits and characteristics such as the ones outlined in the previous section.

When you’re designing your interview process, it can be helpful to list out all the required hard and soft skills for the role and consider how you’ll assess them. For hard skills, you might design a take-home assignment or perhaps one dedicated interview (such as a pair coding session) that will help the hiring team assess a candidate’s capabilities.

For soft skills, it will be more effective to ask behavioural or competency questions. You can distribute these across several interviews. For example, you might have one interviewer assess a candidate’s problem-solving skills by asking several questions related to problem-solving, while another interviewer assesses their leadership skills by asking questions related to leadership.

One additional point to keep in mind: we recommend being thoughtful about what are absolutely necessary skills for the role and what might just be nice-to-haves or create a good impression during the interview. For example, the Customer Success (CS) team at Greenhouse used to ask candidates to create a slide deck as part of their take-home assessment. But in their efforts to create a more inclusive hiring process, they realised that designing slides is not actually a requirement for the role. As a result, they stopped asking candidates to create decks from scratch and started providing templates. This lets candidates focus on the actual content of their presentation and stops the hiring team from assessing candidates on something that’s not actually that important for the role.

Editor’s note: it’s important to note that “soft skills” are also now known as “power skills” or “essential skills”, as the term “soft skills” has been critiqued for often discrediting their importance. We’re referring to them as “soft skills” in this article as that is still the widely known term for these types of skills.