Assessing Your SEO Candidate’s Soft Skills

The most noteworthy trend that we are noticing in our network of SEO agency hiring managers, is that they are prioritising strong soft skills in new hires.

“The most valuable soft skill for recruits is communication (25%), followed by problem-solving (21%) and time management (19%).”
– Bryan Robinson, Ph.D.
Author of Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World: A Guide to Balance.

If your agency offers hybrid or remote work, great soft skills are a must.

It is well-known that hard skills are easier to test and hire for.

But, it’s the soft skills which enhance those hard skills that make a great employee.

Soft skills help prime hard skills and sell them best, to the hiring manager, to the team and even the business.

Hiring managers face a big bottleneck:
They need to quickly assess the strength of soft skills on a CV.

And unfortunately, CVs don’t highlight soft skills well.
So, evaluating them takes too long.

Fortunately, we’ve had experience attracting, vetting and placing forward only the strongest of candidates. 

In the process, viewing hundreds of CVs, and helping to quickly identify how soft skills are best relayed on a CV

We also aim to ask clients what personality traits have, and have not worked for them in the past.

This helps us to target the soft skills we need to find, which also helps the agency think about what their general work culture is like, too. 

Today, we’ll reveal how we assess soft skills on a CV. Then, we’ll help you efficiently evaluate the best applicants.

Top 10 Soft Skills Every Thriving SEO Team Needs:

1. Strategic thinking
2. Negotiation
3. Presentation skills
4. Critical thinking
5. Mentoring
6. Emotional intelligence
7. Innovation
8. Financial Management
9. Persuasion
10. Resilience

On paper, assessing these categories and level of strength within them can be extremely difficult.

Identifying Soft Skills in an Application 

Identifying soft skills is the first stage to differentiating the better applicants from the rest.

You’ll first want to establish what soft skills are lacking within your current team structure, or, what soft skills are both necessary and beneficial for the role. 

There are two key things that you can look out for on a CV that can help you identify soft skills on a CV:

1. Looking for keywords/phrases such as:
   Time management, conflict resolution, collaboration, pitching/presenting, communicating, etc.  
2. Checking job experience:
   The key reason for why CVs exist is to do just that–identifying roles and responsibilities that align with what you’re looking for.
   
   Keep in mind, companies are becoming quite creative with their job roles for a variety of reasons, such as keeping in-line with their brand. You will need to look into skills, experience and responsibilities, rather than focusing solely on the role’s title, itself.  
3. Linkedin profile and social proof:
   You can also assess the above soft skill qualities through a person’s posts and social authority. There are so many accounts where an applicant stood out against their competitors because their social proof was much stronger.
   
   When assessing social profiles, you can automatically see the way an SEO thinks, manages stress and challenges, communicates and judges their personableness.  

Evaluating the Strength of Soft Skills 

1. In the application process, you could include a mandatory question that all applicants need to answer in order to be considered.
   
   This question could be a hypothetical question that you could present to the applicants, to see how they would handle a situation.
   
   For instance, a question you could pose for an SEO Manager could be:
   
   Your client is requesting an urgent deadline, but your team is unable to realistically fulfil the deadline in time. They need an extra three days.
   
   How would you handle this? 

OR

Client: “We are paying a lot each month for you to optimise our website – we don’t really understand what you are doing on a day to day level, can you please clarify?”

OR

Client: “You’re in a client meeting and the client is getting frustrated with either you or a colleague or both because they are unhappy with the low conversions they’re receiving and the emotions escalate on their end. How would you approach this situation?”

This will help you to:
1. Filter out the applicants who did not take the time to respond
2. Assess the strength of soft skills of those who have, by being able to go through their thought processes, management style, negotiation skills, etc.

1. Assessing their portfolio against their roles:
   For instance, if we are going with the SEO Manager example, we can assess their projects and career highlights to identify their soft skills strengths.
   
   For instance, did they help lead a team to a big win, or award, or any form of recognition? How so, and what was the process like?
   
   Did they grow a team?
   Were there any bottlenecks that they faced?
   
   Identifying these scenarios can help further assess the strengths of soft skills within a candidate.  
2. Lastly, running the applicant through a short interview stage with the team, or leadership team, can also help you to further identify how strong the candidates’ soft skills are.

You can use the below scorecard to assess each candidate’s soft skill strengths on the performance of their given assessment. 

Soft Skills Questionnaire and Scorecard: 

If you are looking to hire your next SEO teammate, and looking for someone with outstanding soft skills, get in touch with our team today to find out how we can help fill your role.