--- title: "These Soft Skills Matter Now More Than Ever. Here’s Why. - CoderPad" description: "In an age when working from home is our foreseeable future, soft skills are more important than ever to ensure your team can connect, communication and collaborate." canonical: "https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/soft-skills-matter/" last_modified: "2022-01-05 12:46:58" --- [Back to blog](https://coderpad.io/blog/) # These Soft Skills Matter – Now More Than Ever April 8, 2020 3 Minute Read [Getting Hired](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/) ## These Soft Skills Matter Now More Than Ever. Here’s Why. Right now, there’s only one thing justifiably on everyone’s mind: the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world enters a recession, much of the workforce now starts their work days at home, and companies run planning scenarios for a completely unpredictable landscape, it can feel like everything is irrevocably slowing down. And yet, across multiple industries, there are open, active job requisitions recruiters are trying their best to fill for hiring managers eager to find amazing talent. Hiring remotely presents its own challenges but surprisingly, evaluating technical skills in our new paradigm isn’t so hard with the right tools and interview protocols in place. What’s more difficult? Assessing those soft skills. But in an age when working from home is our foreseeable future, those qualities are more important than ever to ensure your team can connect, communication and collaborate. Here’s what to look for. ### Communication ability In a remote world, communication becomes even more critical at every level. As you’re conducting interviews via phone and on Zoom or Hangouts, consider how your candidates are coming across. Are they personable and straightforward? Do they maintain eye contact? Do they interrupt or talk over you – or do they listen and respond thoughtfully? Ask yourself if you can see this person responding well during a code review with the team – or representing your org to senior leadership – using these remote tools. Make sure to ask some specific questions around how they’ve handled a miscommunication in the past. How did they untangle the issue? Were they proactive in addressing it? Taking ownership in resolving it – without placing blame – is an excellent signal. ### Empathy The current pandemic situation lends itself to some good questions that could surface a candidate’s ability to empathize. A newly at-home workforce, working remotely out of necessity and not choice, is one that’s naturally going to struggle a bit at first. If the role you’re hiring for is managerial, probe on that. How would they help their team adjust? What initial challenges do they perceive as necessary to overcome in the first thirty days – and then further out? How would they set expectations in a time that’s so fluid? For individual contributor levels, ask how they might handle a situation in which a teammate fell short of their commitments because of some work from home issues. How would they handle it? It’s a great sign if the candidate expresses some sympathy for the colleague (“It’s a hard situation”, “These things happen,” “What’s important is getting the work done”) and then surfaces practical ways to pitch in. The best teammates are those who don’t miss a beat when a challenge comes their way and keep their focus on getting the work done for the end user or customer. ### Adaptability Some people adapt to changes in their circumstances more quickly than others, rapidly accepting a new normal and figuring out how to make it work. Resilience, grit, acceptance – whatever you call it, it’s a useful quality in times of stability and it’s outstanding during periods of uncertainty. You can certainly lightly ask how your candidate is adjusting to the new circumstances imposed by COVID-19. But it’s so new and unsettling for most people – after all, no one in modern memory has ever truly been through something like this – it may not be a good marker of a person’s adaptability. Instead, ask about a time when something went suddenly in a new direction and they had to rethink their entire approach to an issue. What steps did they take to adjust? How did they make the best of the circumstances they were given? What did they find hardest about the situation? The more detail you hear around the way they confronted the problem, the better picture you’ll build of that person’s capacity to rebound. ### Hiring managers, what soft skills do you think will be critical in the time of #coronavirus? ## Subscribe for more CoderPad insights ## Trending Articles Previous slide Next slide [Getting Hired ## Best IT Job Fairs for 2024 Learn about 11 great tech events you can find across the United States. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/best-it-job-fairs-for-2024/) [Getting Hired ## College Graduates, Good Advice for a Bad Job Market Can you get a job in tech right now? The stats don’t feel great: one recent Time article notes that there’s one job opening for every two applicants on LinkedIn, job seekers are sending out 40 percent more applications than they did a year ago, and candidates from underrepresented groups are 25 percent more likely […] Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/college-graduates-good-advice-for-a-bad-job-market/) [Development ## Dev Discussions: Breaking into Open Source with GitHub Star Ruth Ikegah Did you know you can get paid to contribute to open source projects? We discuss this and all things open source with GitHub Star Ruth Ikegah. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/development/open-source-with-ruth-ikegah/) [Getting Hired ## Dev Discussions: How To Get a Great Job at a Great Company with James Quick of PlanetScale We talk with YouTube guru James Quick about getting a dev job with content creation. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/dev-discussions-how-to-get-a-great-job-james-quick/) [Getting Hired ## Dev Discussions: Getting a Job in Fortune 500 Companies with Brad Garropy In today's Dev Discussion we talk with Brad Garropy of Web Dev Weekly. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/dev-discussions-fortune-500-jobs-brad-garropy/) [Getting Hired ## Life At Kareo – Show Your Authentic Self, Build Cool Software Like all companies, Kareo has had to do some quick thinking to reshape technical interviews for a COVID-19 era. Here’s what to know if you go for a job with this compelling medical software startup. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/life-at-kareo/) [Getting Hired ## Campus Recruiting in the Time of COVID For many of our large customers, campus recruitment makes up an important part of recruitment efforts for junior hires. It’s a great way to find top talent early in their careers and grow development teams. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/campus-recruiting-in-the-time-of-covid/) [Getting Hired ## An Insider’s Look at How Start-Ups Are Thinking About Hiring in a COVID Era “From building and maintaining a healthy remote culture to getting comfortable hiring a person you’ve never actually met face to face, the present pandemic is pushing founders in new directions.” Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/insider-look-startup-hiring-during-covid/) [Getting Hired ## Thinking About Joining Us? Great! Read This. “I’m glad you’re here - thanks for checking out careers at CoderPad! In the spirit of sharing some useful context and because you’ll find I believe in transparency most of all” Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/thinking-about-joining-coderpad/) [Getting Hired ## It’s a Tough Job Market. Match Your Fear With Grit and Determination, Says Hatch Founder “If you’re job hunting, you will have to match your fear with determination. And remember that recovery might be slow but it is certain.” Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/its-a-tough-job-market-thomson-nguyen-hatch/) [Getting Hired ## You’re More Hireable If You’re Ready to Pitch In Alison Lange Engel, partner at Greycroft and former Chief Marketing Officer at Stripe, said challenges are endemic across industries but they look different depending on the segment. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/youre-more-hireable-if-youre-ready-to-pitch-in-alison-engel/) [Getting Hired ## How Noom Seals the Deal for Candidates Empathy and data run the show at Noom. While other companies might enforce a staggering amount of do’s and don’ts, the popular psychology-based behavior change app currently focused on weight loss is about principles. Read the post](https://coderpad.io/blog/getting-hired/people-over-profits-noom/) ## Hire with confidence. See why engineering teams trust CoderPad to evaluate developers with realistic, AI-ready hiring workflows. [Request a demo](https://coderpad.io/sales/)