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Soft skills, hard questions

软技能，大难题

The hiring process is not well designed to select for social aptitude.

招聘流程的设计并不能选拔出社交能力强的人。

Soft skills matter to employers.

软技能对雇主很重要。

Writing in the Harvard Business Review last year, Raffaella Sadun of Harvard Business School and her co-authors analysed almost 5,000 job descriptions that Russell Reynolds, a headhunter, had developed for a variety of C-suite roles between 2000 and 2017.

哈佛商学院的拉斐拉·萨登和她的合著者去年在《哈佛商业评论》上撰文，分析了猎头公司罗盛咨询在2000年至2017年间，对各种高管职位的近5000份职位描述。

Their work showed that companies have shifted away from emphasising financial and operational skills towards social skills—an ability to listen, reflect, communicate and empathise.

萨登的研究表明，企业已经从强调财务和运营技能转向了强调社交技能：倾听、反思、沟通和共情的能力。

Other research has reached similar conclusions about jobs lower down the pay scale: being able to work well with people is seen not as some fluffy bonus but as a vital attribute.

其他研究调查了薪资水平更低的工作，也得出了类似的结论：能与他人良好合作并不被视为某种没有实际用途的额外优点，而是一种至关重要的品质。

The trouble is that soft skills are hard to measure.

问题在于，软技能很难衡量。

Worse still, the conventional process for recruiting people is often better at picking up on other qualities.

更糟糕的是，传统的招聘流程往往更善于捕捉到其他品质。

The early phases of recruitment focus on filtering candidates based on their experiences and hard skills, since these are the criteria that are easiest to assess at a distance.

招聘的初步阶段侧重于根据应聘者的经验和硬技能来筛选候选人，因为这些是最容易进行远距离评估的标准。

Putting the words “team player” on a cover letter or a CV is proof of nothing save unoriginality.

在求职信或简历上写上“擅长团队合作”这几个字只能证明你毫无创意。

Smiling a lot at a camera for a taped video message demonstrates mainly that you can smile a lot at a camera.

录制视频介绍时，对着摄像机不停微笑主要证明了你确实可以对着摄像机不停微笑。

Self-reported empathy questionnaires sometimes seem to be testing for species-level traits (if you agree that “In emergency situations I feel apprehensive and ill at ease”, many congratulations: you are a human).

自我测评的共情能力问卷有时候像是在测试你是否有人类的物种特征(如果你同意“在紧急情况下，我感到焦虑和不安”，那么恭喜你：你是人类)。

The later phases of recruitment, when candidates and employers meet each other and engage in actual conversation, are better suited to assessing an applicant’s softer skills.

招聘的后期阶段，应聘者和雇主见面并真正交谈，这时才更适合评估应聘者的软技能。

But even then, think of how fundamentally unsocial the situation is.

但即便如此，请想一想，这种情境本质上是多么地不适合社交。

Candidates are expected to talk, not listen; to impress, not empathise.

候选人应该表达，而不是倾听，应该让人印象深刻，而不是与他人共情。

Firms are feted for asking interviewees oh-so-clever Fermi questions like “How many piano-tuners are there in Guangdong?” or “How many cinnamon swirls would it take to fill the Reichstag?”

公司会因为问面试者一些看似聪明的费米问题而受到称赞，比如“广东有多少钢琴调音师？”或者“需要多少肉桂卷才能填满德国国会大厦？”。

Structured interview scripts enable like-for-like comparisons but they also squeeze the space for spontaneity.

结构化面试问卷可以进行同类比较，但也挤压了自由发挥的空间。

No wonder Professor Sadun et al reckon that hiring processes need to get a lot better at winkling out social skills.

因此萨登教授等人认为招聘流程需要在发掘社交技能方面有所改进，这也不足为奇了。

Research is finding some shortcuts for identifying softer skills.

研究人员正在寻找一些识别软技能的捷径。

Two recent studies of what makes for a good team member converge on what might be described as an ability to read the room.

最近两项研究探索了擅长团队合作的人有何特点，这两项研究的结果都落到了一种可以被描述为“阅读周围气氛”的能力上。

They also suggest ways to test for this trait.

他们还提出了测试这一特征的方法。

Research by Siyu Yu of Rice University and her co-authors found that people who can accurately gauge which members of a team wield influence are in possession of a magic power they call “status acuity”.

莱斯大学的于思雨和她的合著者发现，能够准确判断团队中哪些成员拥有影响力的人，拥有一种他们称之为“地位敏锐度”的神奇能力。

Such room-readers reduce group conflict and improve team performance.

这样的气氛阅读者能减少群体冲突，提高团队表现。

As part of their study they devised a test, in which participants watched a video of a group performing a task.

作为研究的一部分，他们设计了一项测试，让参与者观看一组人执行任务的视频。

The participants then rated members of the group based on how much esteem each was held in.

然后，参与者对小组成员受人尊重的程度进行评级。

People whose ratings were closest to the assessments of the team members themselves had the quality of status acuity.

评级最接近小组成员自己的评估结果的人具有地位敏锐度。

In another study Ben Weidman and David Deming of Harvard University also found that certain individuals consistently made their groups perform better than expected.

在另一项研究中，哈佛大学的本·魏德曼和大卫·戴明也发现，某些人总是能让他们的团队表现得比预期的要好。

Such people, they argued, are genuine team players, capable of making the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

他们认为，这样的人是真正的擅长团队合作的人，能够产生一加一大于二的效果。

These wonderful creatures did not stand out from their peers on IQ or personality tests.

这些很棒的人在智商或性格测试中并没有脱颖而出。

But they did significantly better on the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes” test, a standardised assessment in which participants are shown pictures of various facial expressions and then have to pick the word that best describes what each person is feeling.

但他们在“根据眼神读心”的测试中表现要好很多，这种测试是一种标准化的评估方法，参与者会看到不同面部表情的图片，然后选择最能描述这个人的感受的词语。

Better tests are not the only way to elicit more information about social skills.

更准确的测试并不是获取更多关于社交技能的信息的唯一途径。

Don’t just have people higher up the food chain ask interview questions: it is good to see how applicants get on with a range of colleagues.

不要只是让位于食物链高处的人问一些面试问题，看看应聘者与各种同事相处得如何也是一个好办法。

Ask the people who interact casually with applicants, from the assistants who arrange appointments to the receptionists on the day, what they thought of them.

问一下那些与应聘者有过随意接触的人，包括安排面试的助理和当天的前台，问问他们对应聘者有什么看法。

Find out what genuinely worries candidates about the job: lots of research suggests that humility is associated with better performance.

找出应聘者对这份工作真正担心的是什么，许多研究表明，谦逊与更好的表现有关。

Hiring for soft skills will spawn new risks.

雇人时注重软技能也会产生新的风险。

They are squishier than technical skills, which may make it easier for people to fake their way through the process.

软技能比技术能力更难以捉摸，人们更容易在整个应聘过程中假装有软技能。

And there may be more room for interviewers’ biases to creep in.

面试官也更有可能不自觉地产生偏见。

Finding someone irritating may be a signal that someone lacks social skills.

发现某人令人讨厌可能是这个人缺乏社交技能的信号。

But it may also mean that they are nervous, that you are grumpy or that the two of you are not that alike.

但也可能意味着他们很紧张，或者你太暴躁，或者你们两个不是一类人。

Recruitment is set to change. It is not going to get easier.

招聘方式势必会发生变化，而且绝不会变得更简单。

来源：经济学人