Candidates with the right skills are being overlooked by employers more interested in "cultural fit"with their company. The trend is being seen across a wide range of industries and even in highly-skilled roles like project management.
For most roles soft skills and cultural alignment is just as important - if not more important - than technical ability. There’s been a considerable push by employers to hire for a cultural fit. While “cultural fit” can cover a range of skills, employers were mainly looking to align the candidate with the values of the company – be they an entrepreneurial attitude, the proper work-life balance, creativity or how they communicate with others.
You can hire someone as a project manager for a big infrastructure project for example and a big portion of the success of that project will be how that person sells it throughout the business and communicates change.
If someone doesn’t know how to get everyone on board to drive this change, they can be the most technically gifted person in the world, but if they can't get that part right it isn't going to be a success.
If the person has the right attitude and they really want to be in your business - which is critical to a company's cultural success - the rest can be learned. Hiring purely based on experience had come back to bite employer in the past with great candidates on paper not working out.
If soft skills aren't there they rub people up the wrong way and it's a lot more damaging. You don't get the best out of not just one person but everyone that person works with. They're disruptive and can become a poison ivy.
According to a research of 20,000 new hires, 46 per cent of them failed within 18 months. More importantly when new hires failed, 89 per cent of the time it was for attitudinal reasons and only 11 per cent of the time due to lack of skill.
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