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Business leaders have been saying for a while now that artificial intelligence will put a premium on workers who have strong interpersonal skills.
But Sam DeMase says many job seekers are “missing the mark” in effectively showing the soft skills that employers want to see most in their job applications.
Many candidates use their resumes to show how they’ve leaned on “basic human skills” like communication, listening or empathy to work with others, says DeMase, a career expert at the jobs site ZipRecruiter who says she’s helped thousands of people find work.
“That is not enough for employers right now,” she says.
Instead, applicants need to show what she refers to as “advanced” people skills. “The top three human skills employers want right now are critical thinking, judgment and decision making, and creativity,” DeMase tells CNBC Make It, citing ZipRecruiter’s recent AI employer report that surveyed over 1,000 hiring managers in June.
These three skills in particular are “counterpoints to AI’s weak spots,” she adds. “At the same time as employers are elevating their AI skill requirements, they’re elevating their human skill requirements.”
The difference between basic and advanced human skills
Some of the basic soft skills she sees that don’t mean much to hiring managers now include keywords like communication, listening, collaboration and empathy, DeMase says.
Meanwhile, she says more advanced skills include relationship-building, conflict resolution, people-first leadership, ethics and judgment, decision making, critical thinking, creativity, storytelling and inspirational leadership.
Whereas a basic skill names something you’re able to do well, an advanced skill shows how you use that skill to influence people or drive action.
The best way to show these advanced skills is through the bullet points of your job experiences. Follow this formula, DeMase suggests: Name the advanced human skill you used, the scope of work you used it in and the result that made an impact for your team or business.
For example, to show your judgment and decision-making skills, you could have a bullet point explaining that you evaluate AI’s outputs using sound judgment and ethical guidelines to decide which solutions to use on a certain project, resulting in a faster, more seamless process for the team.
Another way to frame things, she says: “Using advanced relationship-building skills, I cultivated authentic, long-term partnerships with three new clients, adding $120K in revenue.”
As she puts it, employers don’t just want to know you have these skills, but also that you know how to put them into practice with other humans and AI-assisted processes to improve the way things work.
There’s “a huge opportunity right now for job seekers to tell stories and provide examples of their advanced human skills,” DeMase says.
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