The Number One Skill Corporate Recruiters Look For
As a higher-education professional, whether you’re in the dean’s office, the career center, or the ivy tower, one of your primary goals is ensuring your students land in good jobs after they leave the university.
But as you’re preparing soon-to-be graduates for success in the corporate world, it can be difficult to know how to help students tailor their applications and prepare for interviews. Great references, job or academic history, and relevant skills all play a role, of course, but recent studies have shown that, when it comes to hiring or promoting employees, the number one skill employers look for is communication.
Bloomberg’s 2016 Job Skills Report showed that communication is the most desired skill recruiters look for, but also one of the hardest to find.
Source: Bloomberg’s 2016 Job Skills Report
Similarly, in their 2017 Corporate Recruiter Survey, the Graduate Management Admission Council found that communication is the most important skill category for new mid-level hires (followed by teamwork, technical, leadership, and managerial skills). And of the specific skills employers look for, four of the top five are related to communication.
This just goes to show that, as you help students hone their strengths, your focus should be on developing their communication skills.
So how do you ensure every graduate is equipped with that number-one skill recruiters want to see?
Traditionally, organizations looking to improve a team’s communication skills would bring in focus groups, consultants, individual coaches, or general communication workshops to solve the problem. But at the university level, where there are too many students with differing needs and not enough budget or time for traditional solutions, there must be another option.
Today, communication analytics can provide personalized insights on every student’s communication skills.
What if each student could upload a video—of a recent interview or presentation—and receive objective evaluations of their communication skills and personalized recommendations showing exactly what they need to work on?
And what if you, as the administrator or program leader, could receive aggregate-level insights that show you the students’ collective strengths and weaknesses and help you identify where to make improvements in group workshops or course curricula?
QC’s data-driven, automated approach to communication analytics offers exactly that, and we’ve supported MBA and EMBA programs at top schools across the country, including Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Texas at Austin.
The easy-to-use platform delivers objective feedback and actionable insights about each user, and it provides leaders with the aggregate data they need to understand the program’s overall strengths and development areas and identify top performers.
Communication is the number one skill employers want in recruits. So why leave it to chance?
If you’re interested in learning more about how Quantified Communications can help your students improve their communication skills and increase their chances of success in the job search, fill out the form below, and one of our experts will contact you to walk you through our platform and process.