With reports suggesting a tough jobs market for graduates, how can employers ensure early careers entrants have the right soft skills to succeed? Mark Griffith looks at why there’s a need to approach soft skills differently.Â
Despite the AI revolution in the workplace, soft skills still dominate the most in-demand skill set on today’s employer wish list.
As LinkedIn’s inaugural Skills on the Rise list found, soft skills such as relationship building, communication and adaptability, are – more than ever – what sets candidates apart.
Soft skills at work
Employers face a ‘soft skills’ crisisÂ
Collaboration and problem-solving identified among future work skillsÂ
At the same time, when it comes to graduate recruitment, soft skills are where young people need the most support in terms of work-readiness, with employers flagging essential communication and interpersonal skills in acutely short supply.
That’s before we get to other competencies such as problem-solving, teamwork and collaboration.
How can employers take a new approach to ensuring their graduate hires have the soft skills needed to thrive in their roles?
Work ready?
Speaking with clients daily, there’s a view that young people are coming into their first workplace roles less prepared than they were 10 years ago.
This lack of work-readiness inevitably leads to poor outcomes in long-term placement success – a recent piece of US research found that eight in 10 graduate hires have been unsuccessful.
We know the context, including that the current cohort of graduate hires will have been home-schooled during the pandemic.
Lockdown conditions will not have only affected their social skills and real-world development, but impacted factors such as work experience opportunities and, in many cases, even a Saturday job which develops skills like simple customer relations, time management and decision-making.
Hybrid and remote working have further reduced the availability of work experience programmes, which are widely recognised as essential for improving employability.
This means some graduates are stepping into a workplace for the first time. And the onus is now on the employer to close the gap on their work-readiness.
The great soft skills gap
A recent study from the Institute of Student Employers found that in 2025, 54% of employers reported that graduates were lacking in self-awareness (up from 43% in 2024) and 46% were concerned about resilience (up from 37% the previous year).
The sense of urgency around the issue has been highlighted as organisations accelerate their return-to-office mandates, bringing teams back into the workplace.
This means managers are facing the skills gap head-on, seeing the immediate impact of poor communication skills in meetings or face-to-face interactions.
Hybrid has meant many young people have essentially been able to hide behind Zoom meetings and in Slack channels rather than learning how to negotiate a conversation or in-person presentation.
Think back to how you developed your own soft skills. It was listening to your manager close a sales call and quietly taking notes.
It was watching your director’s body language in a pitch meeting and learning how to conduct yourself in a high-stakes environment.
Today’s graduate cohort simply haven’t been exposed to these learning opportunities in the same way.
Recruiting like humans
What are the steps recruiters can take to bridge the soft skills crisis? Soft skills can only be recruited through soft skills. Which is why both human intervention and interaction is vital at the earliest possible stage in the recruitment process.
As AI continues to change the shape of hiring, more and more assessment centres are delving deeper into understanding the core skills a candidate has during the process.
Smart employers are already building more soft skills development into their onboarding programmes.”
Employers want to be clear on the level of proficiency of each skill, and what level is required at each position.
The most effective way to do this is to move away from over-reliance on remote interaction to skills-test on a human level, in a physical assessment centre.
Smart employers are already building more soft skills development into their onboarding programmes.
Again, while technology has driven great efficiencies here, skills like communication and relationship building can benefit from critical cultivation when delivered human-to-human.
Resetting expectations
Here’s the hard truth; as employers, we’re also taking stock of the skill sets needed in the new world of work, increasingly dominated by AI led tools.
Is it fair to expect young, inexperienced people to come equipped with a specific set of skills, when we haven’t adapted to these ourselves?
There has also been a shift in philosophy with most recruiters that it’s more important for a candidate to have transferable skills that they can apply to different roles and circumstances, if we’re going to create a more agile workforce.
Bear in mind too, that most graduate programmes are two to three years long; by the time a graduate finishes the complete programme, the roles on offer will often be very different to what they signed up for.
Skills like adaptability, flexibility and resilience will therefore become key – ones that fewer young people will be able to demonstrate a high proficiency for and instead be able to cultivate their competencies by building these into development programmes.
Mentorship is a brilliantly effective way to support soft skills development and we’re seeing the requirement for this across our client base.
The specific nature of a mentor relationship – rather than line manager – offers the environment for positive feedback, collaborative thinking and communication that soft skills development thrives in.
This current graduate cohort has faced – and is facing – seismic changes in coming into the world of work now. Which is why it’s essential that employers rethink their approach to how they hire for and embed soft skills development into the full graduate journey.
What’s key is the human touch here – as leaders we need to be modelling these behaviours as much as possible too, accelerating skills growth to ensure our graduates have the best opportunity to thrive in the workplace.
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