Closing the Soft Skills Gap in the Canadian Workforce

If you’re having trouble finding workers with the skills you need to compete, you’re not alone. More than 80 percent of employers report that they are experiencing a skills gap — particularly a soft skills gap — in their workplace.

Surprisingly, the hardest to find qualifications aren’t tech-focused hard skills. The top 10 soft skills employers report having trouble finding are:

Problem-solving
Critical and analytical thinking
Management, leadership, and team-building
Communication skills
Interpersonal skills
Teamwork and collaboration
Work ethic and initiative
Flexibility and adaptability
Attention to details
Sales and customer service

The scarcity of these skills is costing companies potential revenue. It’s estimated that the inability to find skilled workers will cost Canadian businesses billions of dollars annually. As technology continues to advance, hiring managers predict that many of today’s job functions will be performed by robotics, artificial intelligence, and other forms of automation, while jobs that require critical thinking, problem-solving, and other soft skills will grow. The five strategies below can help you bridge the soft skills gap.

Skills-Focused Labor Demands

Recent job gains in Canada were concentrated in just a few sectors, most notably healthcare, government, and professional, scientific, and technical services. “The increase in job creation, particularly in sectors like healthcare and technical services, is evidence of the continued strong demand for workers with sector-specific skills,” says Monster Economist Giacomo Santangelo. “Increasing unemployment could be due to various factors, most notably mismatches in skills and job requirements.”

As the skills gap grows, Monster’s 2024 Work Watch report identified improving the success rate on hard-to-fill roles as one of employers’ top priorities this year. This will be crucial as labor demands continue to increase with Monster’s total active job postings up 11% in May, following a 6% increase in April. Santangelo says, “Employers can engage better with candidates by catering more toward transitioning candidate preferences for things like flexible hours and remote work (“work from home” remains the #1 search on Monster), by being more transparent about the application process, and by investing in training and development to bridge the skills gap and attract candidates seeking growth opportunities.”

1. Be Sure of the Skills You Need

Despite the fact that most employers cite the skills gap as an impediment to maximizing profits, nearly half of all HR professionals were unsure of what skills they are actually missing. The truth is you can’t know what skills you’re lacking until you undertake a thorough workforce skills gap assessment, beginning with a company-wide survey that aims to learn not only what skills your workers employ in their current positions, but also skills they have used in the past.

Some soft skills to consider mining information about as you craft your survey include:

Social skills, such as interpersonal communication, conflict resolution, teamwork, collaboration, and team-building
Workplace etiquette, including email etiquette, maintaining appropriate boundaries, and resisting the urge to overshare
Sales skills and customer service
Adaptability, innovation, and creativity
Organization and time management

Once you attain a better idea of what skills you already have, you can begin mapping them to the skills you need to grow your business and see which skills you lack. From there, you will need to devise a strategy to develop the skills you need within your current staff and attract talent with the skills you need.

2. Implement an Upskilling Strategy

Armed with more complete knowledge about your soft skills gap, you might be tempted to immediately begin an aggressive recruitment campaign to find workers with the skills you need. But in the long run, implementing a comprehensive workplace upskilling program, combined with more targeted recruiting, may be a more sustainable approach.

Your upskilling strategy should combine two or more of the following:

Designated mentoring: Pairing entry and midlevel employees with senior staff can help employees develop soft skills, particularly when it comes to navigating workplace relationships, negotiating with vendors, developing communication and presentation skills, and improving sales and customer service techniques.
Frequent feedback: Rather than relying on infrequent high-stakes employee reviews tied to compensation, implement a culture of frequent low-stakes feedback that includes brainstorming on ways to improve skills.
Soft skills training: Bring in outside speakers for inspiration and small group facilitators for upskilling. Invest in automated self-directed learning modules and remote learning opportunities. Keep your company’s membership in professional and industry associations up to date and invest in sending team members to conferences and trainings that address areas where they need to improve.

3. Get Better at Recognizing Potential

Recognize the transferrable aspects of expiring and emerging skills and offer resources that allow your employees to transition from their current competencies to new in-demand skills in a way that bolsters their confidence by:

Focusing on the soft skills your employees already possess. For example, if they are great at teamwork but tend to avoid conflict, you can guide them to use their relationship-building skills to address communication challenges.
Giving workers gradually increasing amounts of authority and autonomy. A worker who is nervous about public speaking should not be assigned a big presentation in front of a large audience if they’ve never been tasked with one before. But they will likely benefit from working with a more confident public speaker to develop and present a small portion of a larger presentation.
Recognizing that your expectations may be unrealistic. Your workplace’s soft skills gap may not be as dire as you think. As your industry changes, you’ve likely added a host of new skills to your job descriptions, but have you jettisoned skills that are no longer relevant? If not, your job descriptions have likely morphed into a laundry list of qualifications no job applicant could possibly possess and discourage talented candidates from applying.

4. Improve Your Recruiting Game

The most important soft skill to look for to keep up with the rate of change workplaces are likely to experience in the coming years is adaptability. Rather than looking for applicants with a particular set of skills you need right now, keep in mind that many of the jobs that seem so vital today will not exist tomorrow.

The best way to address your soft skills gap is to look for candidates who have a passion for learning and whose resumes demonstrate a track record of embracing change. A close second is learning to recognize transferrable skills that can be leveraged to help your business succeed. This can be accomplished by revising your candidate filtering processes, including adjusting your applicant tracking system (ATS) to recognize a wider range of keywords.

Finally, work with local educational institutions and get involved in professional associations to communicate the skills you need and establish talent pipelines to address staffing needs.

5. Embrace Flexibility

It’s not just your workers who need to embrace change. For many job functions an onsite 9-to-5 work schedule is no longer necessary, nor is it desired by many top performers. Offering remote and hybrid scheduling options can increase the geographic scope of your talent acquisition efforts.

A growing number of workers prefer the flexibility of contract or freelance work, so you may need to outsource, at least temporarily, to address your soft skills gap. If you are planning to contract for freelance expertise you don’t possess in-house, consider adding coaching and upskilling your staff to the duties of your contracted workers. Once they’ve trained your staff to shoulder these duties, you can transition those functions to your existing staff.

Once you’ve established alternative work policies and an aggressive upskilling strategy, you can underscore these features in your hiring efforts and leverage them to hire more workers with the soft skills you need.

How to Identify Soft Skills: Interview Tips

Soft skills are more important to employers than ever, which is a surprise to many millennials and others who have banked on their tech-heavy resumes to land the best jobs. Companies want soft skills, but they’ve discovered that it’s not so easy to assess a candidate’s soft skills from a resume.

Most employers know what soft skills are, but they have trouble recognizing them in the hiring process. For the most part, they hope interviews will give them some indication as to whether a new hire will work out.

Six Soft Skills to Look for in Hiring

In general, employees use soft skills to interact with their environment and the people around them. Six skills, in particular, stand out:

Adaptability
Communication
Conflict resolution
Critical observation
Problem-solving
Teamwork

It’s easy enough to write skills like these down on a list, but it’s an entirely different task to identify them in job applications. Start by putting the soft skills you seek in your job descriptions.

Ideally, your candidates will read the job description and know what soft skills are expected of them. Likewise, when assessing soft skills, interview candidates by going beyond the general skills and experience required for the position. There are a hundred possible questions, but you need to focus on behavioral interview questions to bring out those soft skills.

How to Identify Soft Skills With Behavioral Interview Questions

In a behavioral interview, the employer wants to know how the candidate will perform in different circumstances. Often, it’s more about adaptability, communication, and problem-solving than about degrees or job titles.

Bruce Tulgan, author of Bridging the Soft Skills Gap: How to Teach the Missing Basics to Today’s Young Talent, suggests that employers learn how to identify soft skills by asking job seekers problem-solving questions. For example:

Tell us a story about a time you solved a problem at work.
Tell us a story about a conflict you had with another employee at work.
Can you tell us about a time when you disagreed with your manager’s directions or priorities? How did you respond?
Tell us a time when you made a mistake or were asked to go back and make corrections. How did you handle it?

The key to learning how to identify soft skills with behavioral questions is to avoid leading questions that may elicit canned or less-than-genuine responses. In general, you want to ask questions that prompt self-reflection and candid responses.

Identifying Soft Skills Through Observation

Of course, beyond a candidate’s past experiences, your interview itself is a good mechanism to investigate their soft skills. While it’s important to keep in mind that everyone brings some level of anxiety to the formal interview process, a candidate with good soft skills will nonetheless exhibit certain behaviors during your interview. Keep an eye out for:

Eye contact: Does the candidate have a hard time looking you in the eye or, conversely, is the candidate intensely staring you down like boxers in a pre-match press conference? Eye contact should be casual, so it’s okay to have short breaks in contact every now and then, so long as they reconnect with you, especially when you’re talking. That’s a good sign of active listening.
Organization: One of the most important skills in handling any task is organization. As your candidates to explain how they would perform a particular assignment, then watch for how they would execute the assignment step-by-step.
Interruptions: Interrupting a person is often a sign of poor communication skills. Of course, if a candidate keeps talking and talking, you may have to interrupt. Also not a good sign.
Evasion: When people don’t answer direct questions, it usually means they don’t have a good answer or they can’t focus. Either way, they’re evading the question.