Technical Vs Soft Skills in IS Recruitment – The Essential Paradox

Let’s start with the basics…

Technical Skills? The hardcore technical expertise of a person gained through educational qualification(s) and previous professional experience.

Soft Skills? The cluster of a person’s personality traits, social abilities and communication skills that enable one to be a team player or leader, as the need of a particular job may be.

Technical VS Soft Skills in Information Systems Sector

The basic paradox one encounters while recruiting personnel for an organization working on Computer Information Systems is the chasm between technical and soft skills. While the former is the oft-mentioned criteria, the latter is more often than not the hidden or indirect factor that governs actual hiring. Some may favour the importance of one over the other, while for others the vice versa is true.

Let us look at how each one of the two, and both in consortium, feed into the IS industry.

Importance of Technical Skills

No doubt good technical skills are paramount in the Information Systems industry as these are specific to the work profile under question. And the fact gets reflected in the language and conditions used for advertising such vacancies through various media. In fact, technical expertise in a particular area is important with respect to the kind of career growth one is looking for in the IS sector.

Importance of Soft Skills

We are all aware of the role that diplomacy, politics and grapevine play at a workplace – all involve soft skills of employees overtly or covertly.

Research has shown the importance of soft skills in determining the productivity of an organization. Though job advertisements may remain silent when it comes to soft skills required for IS industry, having an effective set of such skills can make you The Preferred One among equally qualified candidates.

Technical AND Soft Skills While Recruitment

Over the recent years, recruiters have been partaking of what psychologists call the Image Theory – which is an offshoot of behavioural decision theory. Jargon apart, the recruitment model based on this theory is divided into two stages:

Stage 1: For a particular job opening, the technical skills of candidates are analyzed in order to filter the appropriate ones from among them. Written tests and documentation become the essential tools at this stage.

Stage 2: Face-to-face interview with candidates shortlisted on the basis of their technical background at Stage 1 becomes the medium for evaluating their soft skills, leading to actual recruitment.

Conclusion?

Whether you swing to one side of the argument or the other depends on the kind of people you want to have as the backbone of your company, the fact remains that there is no absolute answer to the technical vs. soft skills debate. While one is important, the other is not unimportant as well!

The bottom line is to weigh both sides of the coin and recruit those you “feel” can turn out to be the right human resources for you.