Soft skills aren’t soft anymore.

Since 2019, HR thinkers have been rebranding “soft skills”—human-centric skills, such as communication, teamwork, and leadership—as “power skills.” Why the change?

The term “soft skills” was coined by the U.S. Army in the late 1960s. The Army applied the term to important skills that do not require the use of machinery; by contrast, skills that do involve machinery have since that time been known as “hard skills.” But that basic distinction is now giving way to a more nuanced view.

We all know hard skills are important to every job. Each position has different hard skills that employees need to have (e.g. technical, software, and hardware knowledge for an IT professional, spatial awareness, design, and carpentry skills for a contractor). But at the end of the day, what are the skills every employee needs to have? Soft skills. 

But, what are soft skills? They’re the skills you’d like to see in the people you work with, like good communication, flexibility, and adaptability.

While education, experience, and certification are important for scoring an interview, a new study by the HR software provider iCIMS finds that recruiters place a higher value on soft skills. From an ability to communicate well to being organized, these intangible qualities can be tough to measure, but they affect everything from productivity to collaboration.