Evaluate for the Long Term with Soft Skill Data

Marie Baldauf-Lenschen
September 17, 2020

Marie Baldauf-Lenschen, Senior Product Manager at pymetrics, discusses the importance of soft skills and how they can help you hire for the future. 


Watch the session here


What are soft skills? 

Soft skills are inherent attributes comprising people’s emotional, social, and cognitive skills. Industry leader Josh Bersin notes, “soft skills are difficult to build, critical, and take extreme effort to obtain.”, while hard/technical skills are “relatively easy to learn”. pymetrics uses soft skills to measure a candidate's future success instead of relying on past experience as a predictor. 


Why should you care? 

Soft skills give us the ability to understand people holistically. While hard skills are useful to identify knowledge gaps or technical abilities that may need to be addressed during onboarding, soft skills are, while historically harder to quantify, really the future of hiring. The future of work is evolving and hard skills change alongside it. According to Deloitte, most hard skills can be expected to become obsolete in five years. Soft skills are inherent, therefore, stable in nature, and necessary to understand as a talent team to build your most future-proofed workforce. It is essential to understand the emotional, social, and cognitive makeup of a person in order to understand how they will ultimately fit the role and the organization. 


How pymetrics measures soft skills. 

pymetrics’ gamified assessment is the patented gold standard for measuring cognitive, social, and emotional traits. Over the course of gameplay, thousands of data points are collected that reveal candidates’ soft skill makeup. In total there are twelve games, and at the completion of each game, the candidate receives comprehensive feedback on what was being measured and how they did. After all games are completed, the candidate has access to all the aggregated results, and receive information on how their skills relate to how they fit in within the workforce, and where they stand out . 



What pymetrics measures. 



A data driven way to understand competencies. 

Many of pymetrics’ clients care about agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, and extraversion. Using the platform allows you to map the soft skills of incoming employees to the competencies your organization cares about and already has. This gives you a greater understanding of where your employees and candidates fall in relation to said competencies in order to strengthen and support your organization. 


The possibilities are endless. 

Soft skills are the future of people management. They have the power to help you better understand capabilities of the future, develop teamwork and team effectiveness, enhance retention and diversity, and so much more! 


To watch the live session recording in full, please click here.