This is certainly the most dreaded part during an interview. It can go either way: the interviewee becomes tense and start mentioning incoherent thoughts or becomes quite fluent and adds up unnecessary information. Personally, I can relate to the former situation, especially when I was in the lookout for my first job. What actually should we say that can benefit our candidateship then?
First, it is important to clarify my understanding of soft and hard skills. The former are teachable abilities or skill sets that are easy to quantify, while the latter relate to the way a person interacts with other people and, consequently, are harder to quantify.
While hard skills are necessary for any position, employers are increasingly looking for job applicants with certain soft skills (wrongly mixed up conceptually with talent). That’s because it’s generally easier for an employer to train a new employee in a hard skill (programming in a new language) than to train an employee in a soft skill (such as patience or tolerance).
During an interview, you’ll want to emphasize both your hard and soft skills that apply to the specific company. For instance, if you are running for project manager, you can emphasize a particular soft skill like empathy that you know would be valuable in the position. Besides, just saying that you have the skill isn’t very meaningful, the best approach according to this article, in The Balance Careers website, is to demonstrate through action, i.e. by sharing examples of times when you used it. In addition, it will be helpful to consider the following steps when preparing the interview:
- Incorporate skills into your resume
- Include relevant skills in your cover letter.
- Share your skills during job interviews.
Finally, I would like to recommend that you go over The Balance Careers portal and browse through their list of skills for resumes, cover letters, and interviews. They have lots of information to get inspiration for which skills to highlight during the job application process to secure a more solid and employable profile.
PM Reflections 