What Are Soft Skills & How To Use Them In Your Job Applications

Learn about soft skills that you can use to describe your strengths (or weaknesses) when asked in your job application or interview. 

What Are Soft Skills?

Soft skills refer to non-technical skills, often interpersonal or organisational in nature. These are more about your personal characteristics than specific qualifications. 

These are sometimes also referred to as other keywords, such as “human skills” or “personal skills”.

The great thing about soft skills is that they are transferable between different job types and industries. This is key for anyone looking to switch to a new career path or starting their employment journey with little relevant experience in their chosen field. 

Common Soft Skills

A common soft skill mentioned by job candidates is ‘teamwork’. Most jobs will require interacting, collaborating, and working with other people. Employers will want to know that you can join their business and interact with the existing staff without friction. It’s an important interpersonal and communication soft skill for any workplace, which is why it is so popular amongst candidates. And since it is unavoidable in most workplaces, you can easily transfer your experience in one role to a role in another industry. 

For example, if you worked with a small team at a busy cafe, you can say that this gave you the experience of working with others in a time-sensitive and fast-paced environment, allowing you to build the ability to coordinate and delegate tasks so that no one is in another’s way despite the limited space and overlapping tasks.

Another related soft skill is ‘leadership’. This is great for anyone looking to get a managerial role or get promoted. It builds off the ‘teamwork’ skill, but requires the ability to organise and delegate to others. As a team leader, you are responsible for ensuring that your team stays organised, on task, and communicates well with one another. Sometimes it also means you will be responsible for making hard decisions. 

Other common soft skills include:

• Communication
• Adaptability 
• Problem solving
• Critical thinking
• Self-management
• Organisation

How To Use Soft Skills In A Job Interview or Application

When using them in a job interview or application, you can support your claim by providing an example from your own experience. After all, anyone can say that they are a great problem solver, but how can the hirer know for sure? 

If you’re looking for a job in an industry where you don’t have much experience, don’t worry! As mentioned before, soft skills are easily transferred from one context to another. Your group assignment or school extracurricular can showcase skills like teamwork or leadership. Your part-time job stacking shelves in the supermarket can show your organisational skills and attention to detail. Your customer service job can show that you’ve developed your communication and problem-solving skills. There are many different ways to adapt your existing experience, even if it is limited, to the job you are applying for. You need to find at least one strong example of where you used this skill to achieve a good result. 

The most popular way to relate your experience to showcase your strengths and skills is the STAR Method. We’ll go into detail about this in another post, but the general idea is that you want to structure your explanation like this:

1. Situation: What was the situation? Provide the interviewer with some context first.
2. Task: What were you trying to achieve? What was your objective? 
3. Action: What action did you take? What did you actually do? This is where you relate it to your skills and strengths. 
4. Result: What was the result? What happened as a result of your actions?