The Top 10 Soft Skills of 2025 (and 2024)
Discover the top 10 soft skills to prioritize in 2025 according to more than 180 recruitment specialists... Sometimes called behavioral skills, soft skills are now of the greatest importance. A real priority for companies, these skills, which are not to be confused with personality traits, are difficult to identify and assess, both for candidates and for recruiters.
To allow recruiters to prioritize their actions, we worked on the following question:
What are the most sought-after soft skills?
To answer it, Yuzu conducted a barometer with 180 HR and recruitment specialists. focusing on the most important soft skills for 2024.
During our interviews, we also took care to ask managers to prioritize these same soft skills.
In this article, you will find the ranking of the 10 soft skills to prioritize in 2024 according to our barometer.
To go further, we recommend recruiters and HR specialists to download the complete study. You will have access to all the statistics, the differences in assessments between recruitment agencies and companies (you will also have the details of priorities according to the size of the structures) and finally the experts' focus on the skills to be preferred or integrated for managers.
Download the 2024 soft skills barometer
1 - What is a soft skill?
There is no precise definition to define soft skills. They are linked to interpersonal skills and behavior.
To illustrate them, a dozen of these skills come out very regularly, such as creativity, conflict management or empathy...
The first step of our study was the framing, with the experts, of a list of universal soft skills that allowed us to define twenty skills recognized by all actors.
Soft skills are behavioral skills linked to interpersonal skills
To simplify their understanding, they are generally opposed to hard skills, technical skills directly linked to a job such as mastering a foreign language or software.
Chez Yuzu we consider soft skills as the ability to adapt one's behavior according to the situation: knowing how to manage stress, demonstrate autonomy, put yourself in a learning situation.
2 - The 10 soft skills to prioritize in 2025 (Yuzu barometer):
1- Adaptability
2- Team work
3- Learning ability
4- Decision making
5- Empathy
6- Problem solving
7- Stress management
8- Integrity
9- Critical thinking
10- Curiosity
3 - The point on each soft skill
THEadaptability, also synonymous with cognitive flexibility or agility, refers to the ability to adapt to new environments or new situations.
THEteam spirit reflects the ability of a person to participate in the achievement of a shared goal, to collaborate with others, to favor the success of the group rather than its individual success.
La learning ability is the ability to learn something new and to be able to apply it in a specific context.
La oddity, it can be referred to as a personality trait. In terms of competence, it is the ability to be interested in and understand unknown things.
THEautonomy is the capacity for initiative, discernment and self-organization.
La stress management is the ability to maintain self-control in order to act effectively in the face of irritating, unexpected situations.
THEemotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand and control one's own emotions and to deal with the emotions of other collaborators.
THEintegrity is the ability to be authentic and to make ethical decisions based on honesty, trust, fairness, and respect.
La problem solving is the ability to think effectively and to bounce back methodically when faced with a problem, in order to improve a situation.
La time management is the ability to make good use of the established working time, by planning and determining priorities in advance to organize activities.
4 - How to assess these soft skills in candidates?
Whether it is to recruit the best profiles or to develop the performance of your team, you will necessarily have to set up a process for evaluating these very particular skills.
To meet your needs, you must first carry out an analysis within your department, to find the skills that have an impact in your organization.
What are the key skills of your collective?
What are the key skills of your most successful employees?
Once you've established your list, you can move on to the evaluation of your candidates or employees.
Several solutions exist, such as online tests and logic mini-games. These methods have the advantage of being very accessible and inexpensive. On the other hand, they are subject to criticism on the proposed candidate experience and on the quality of the results obtained.
The most appropriate choice seems to be that of simulation. The assessment of skills cannot be based exclusively on the declarative of talents or on the sometimes subjective feelings of the hierarchy if we talk about employees: the assessment, which is also called Assessment, must be accompanied by tools and based on taking into account concrete professional situations.
These, because of their immersive nature, will allow you to turn the assessment of these skills into a pleasant moment and your results, which are more natural, will be of better quality.
For example, you can use a Assessment Center, a method that assesses a candidate's skills through several psychometric tools and through various scenarios.
To carry out accurate and entertaining evaluations, we chose at Yuzu to use gamification and neuroscience. The immersive values offered by the latest Video Game technologies make it possible to differentiate the company, to benefit from online (and therefore asynchronous) evaluation and finally to offer a quality evaluation by adapting Game scenarios to scientific research work.
Evaluate the soft skills of your candidates with Yuzu
The advantages of our solution:
- One candidate experience exceptional for boosting your employer brand;
- A solution accessible to all to ensure equal opportunities;
- A decision support tool to detect and promote interpersonal skills.
Whether it's for your recruitment process Or of internal mobility, we are transforming soft skills assessment in a moment Loud and playful.
To remember
Hard skills, otherwise called technical skills, and diplomas are no longer enough. The human and transversal skills that are soft skills are just as important, if not more so.
According to our barometer, the 3 soft skills to prioritize in 2025 are Adaptability, Team Spirit and Learning Capacity, but the skills you will target must depend on your criteria, challenges, areas of activity...
When it comes to recruitment, the trend is towards “entrepreneurial” profiles: the skills put forward illustrate the need for versatility, agility and continuous progression that companies love.
Before accelerating your hiring and training processes related to these skills, our advice is as follows: listen to your teams, promote communication moments to define a strategy that will make sense.
Finally, choose the assessment tools that are appropriate for the job you are evaluating. Think of the triptych: precision, candidate experience and equal opportunities.
By combining a good analysis of your needs and a good assessment of your skills, you will be able to achieve your goals very effectively.
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