Beyond Resumes: Evaluating Soft Skills in Senior-Level Headhunting

When you are looking for a job as a salesperson, retail assistant, or mechanic, there is a list of solid skills – qualifications even – that can be quantified by the hiring panel, with suitable candidates having those skills and unsuitable prospects lacking them. The higher up in any organization that you move, the more amorphous and hard to elucidate the qualifications and desired skill set becomes. Eagle Headhunters are excellent at uncovering these valuable skills and matching the right candidate with their dream position. Let’s take a look at the most highly prized soft skills.  

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the ability to take superficial and incomplete information and read into it to see a deeper and more realistic picture of the true facts. For example, an employee complaining that none of their colleagues like them is a sad happenstance – but if they then go on to say that no colleagues at any of their previous places of employment have liked them either, a critical thinker might begin to wonder what it is about the employee that could be the problem, rather than blindly sympathizing with them!  

Predictive Projection

Good managers can see the business’s profit and loss patterns as they are now and extrapolate these into a reasonably accurate picture of how they will be in the future. The growing demand for corporate accountability, the urgency of the green movement, and various political alliances and statements all can have a dramatic impact on a business’s profitability and the stability of its future, and being able to pinpoint nascent trends and take steps to move in the right direction can be the difference between future profits and potential losses.

Effective Communication

Good communication is essential in any business. Managers should be accessible to everyone, and there should be clear and impartial lines of command along which suggestions, complaints, and observations can travel. Clear and well-established lines of communication help to keep companies running smoothly, ensure cross-training happens as scheduled, and help to prevent middle managers from potentially overworking or mistreating their underlings.

Positive Mental Attitude

Cheerful, positive people are a pleasure to work with, brightening everyone’s day and helping even the most unpleasant tasks pass by as painlessly as possible. The alternative: a pessimist who complains about everything, actively looks for problems and setbacks, and who generally drags the mood down when they enter

the room – can be hard to work with, and this can actually cause good employees to leave who otherwise might stay and do their bit to boost the company’s revenues.

Conflict Resolution

People with critical thinking can often spot the problems in a system or process – but those who can spot those problems and come up with a solution for it at more or less the same time are rare creatures indeed! People like this are also usually very good at resolving conflicts between staff members, ensuring that those who irritate each other don’t work together more than they have to, and finding ways to ease those tensions with team building and trust exercises.

Adaptability

Finally, the ability to adapt to changing situations is an excellent skill. While there can, sometimes, be made a case for staying the course, the modern world changes fast and seldom swings back to exactly the same position as before, which means that being able to change quickly, without too much drama is an invaluable skill which is highly prized in the realms of management recruitment.