Business Leaders United (BLU) recently interviewed 75 small businesses about hiring and skills assessment. One unexpected finding in the research: Soft skills are crucially important, but which soft skills employers emphasize really matters when it comes to making effective hires.
BLU’s Jeran Culina sat down with Amanda Bergson-Shilcock to talk about the findings and what they mean for policymakers and skills advocates – especially as Workforce Pell implementation begins.
Q. What’s all this about clothes?
A. “It’s not just clothing, it’s the teamwork” is a lighthearted phrase that my co-worker Amanda came up with to explain what we were seeing in our research. Every business we talked to said soft skills were important. But there was a big difference between companies that were focused on more commonplace issues – like dress codes – and companies that were looking for specific skills, like teamwork or critical thinking, and could articulate the business necessity for those skills. Companies in that second group generally followed a whole set of strong hiring practices, and they reaped the dividends.
Q. What prompted the research project that you did?
A. We wanted to talk to smalland mid-sized businesses about their experiences hiring and assessing the skills of entry-level workers. So often the news about businesses and hiring focuses on very large businesses. We wanted to get into the details of what it’s like for a company with 15, 80, 250 employees – not thousands and thousands.
There were also two big trends happening in the workforce field that we wanted to get insight into. The first was “skills-based hiring,” or the approach of removing unnecessary bachelor’s degree requirements and focusing instead on the specific skills that a position demands. And the second was about how to gauge the quality of short-term credentials. People know what a 2-year or 4-year degree means, but shorter, non-degree credentials are less well known.
We decided to interview CEOs and senior HR staff at small businesses to hear how they were thinking about these issues.
Q. What kinds of businesses did you talk to?
A. We interviewed 75 small and mid-sized businesses located in 40 different states. Most were in the manufacturing and construction industries. We picked those industries because we wanted a middle ground in terms of how often they require credentials for entry-level workers. In those industries, some frontline roles require credentials, but others do not.
We thought those industries were more representative of our economy as a whole than industries at one end of the spectrum, like the retail sector (where very few entry-level jobs require credentials) or the other end, like healthcare (where almost all jobs require credentials).
Q. What did businesses have to say about soft skills?
A. Every single business leader we talked to mentioned soft skills. Every single one. Sometimes it was to complain about them, and sometimes it was to praise them, but they were always important.
When we started to analyze the notes from our various interviews, we realized that businesses had two very different ideas of what soft skills were. One was basically compliance oriented. This definition of soft skills is focused on outward appearances, timeliness, etc. People will talk about wanting to hire workers who can “cover up their tattoos,” or they’ll even say they want people who can “get off the couch and go to work.”
I want to be clear that these are really common preferences! Lots of employers talk about them. But it turns out that the subset of employers who have strong hiring practices don’t tend to emphasize those kinds of soft skills. In our report, we call the subset with strong hiring practices leading businesses.
Q. How did the leading businesses talk about soft skills?
A. It’s so interesting. They had more rigorously defined what kind of soft skills they were looking for. Often, those were interpersonal skills. Things like teamwork, collaboration, strong written and spoken communication skills.
These businesses had really done their homework. They were able to explain what kind of skills they were looking for when hiring for specific roles, and why they needed those particular skills. It wasn’t a vibes-based approach; they were actually connecting the dots between the specific skill and the business necessity.
Q. What’san example of a business that wants to hire for these interpersonal skills?
A. One CEO at a small Mississippi company told us, “We’re a lean manufacturing organization, so we do regular gemba walks. That means I need every worker on the floor, including the janitor, to be comfortable taking the microphone and talking to their colleagues, their boss, and me about their work.”
For him, soft skills weren’t something abstract or vague. It was very concrete: If a worker didn’t have strong spoken communication skills and strong critical thinking skills, they couldn’t fulfill their role in the lean manufacturing process, which looks to workers themselves to speak up about how to change business operations to make the work more efficient and productive.
Q. What do these findings mean for education and workforce advocates?
A. It’s a great affirmation of the value of teaching these interpersonal skills. Many programs teach them, but they don’t always talk about it to employers, nor do they tell their students how to talk about what they’ve learned in a job interview. I’d like to see students equally well prepared to talk about their technical skills and their interpersonal skills.
BLU isn’t the first organization to ask businesses about soft skills, but our data is distinct in that it comes from small businesses in particular. And frankly, we were happy to see that our findings reflect themes that others have found, including the recent work from America Succeeds on what they call “durable skills.”
As colleges begin to implement Workforce Pell, these findings are relevant for their employer outreach as well as their program design.
Q. Are there any implications for policymakers?
A. Definitely! We know that policymakers are keenly interested in what local businesses need to thrive. And now we have data – straight from the source – about what small businesses value when it comes to interpersonal skills.
But we don’t see the level of investment that is needed to support workforce and education programs that help people build these skills. As governors oversee state implementation of Workforce Pell, it’s an ideal time to examine how they can use the information from our research to ensure that this new federal funding accomplishes its mandate of responding to labor market demand. High-quality short term training programs should allow workers to build key interpersonal skills alongside other technical skills – and states should consider opportunities to amplify the impact of Workforce Pell with additional investments.
