Soft skills: what if we stopped hiring CVs and started understanding people?

Two freelancers. The same skills. Ten years of experience each. And yet one transforms your project while the other turns your meetings into a nightmare. The difference? It's probably not on their CV.

Welcome to the world of soft skills. Everyone talks about them, everyone claims to have them, and very few companies know how to actually assess them.

What if cognitive and behavioural science could help change that?

What exactly are soft skills?

Let's start with a simple idea.

Technical skills, or hard skills, tell you whether someone can do a job. Soft skills tell you how they will do it.

Take two procurement consultants. Both know how to negotiate, know their supplier markets and can run a tender. On paper, it's hard to tell them apart.

Now put them in an organisation where teams are under pressure, decisions drag on and suppliers are hard to mobilise.

The first one tries to impose his method, gets frustrated by the pushback and ends up working alone. The second takes the time to understand the people involved, adapts how he communicates, spots what is blocking and gets decisions moving.

Same technical expertise. Two radically different experiences for the client.

What changes? How they communicate, handle disagreement, make decisions and adapt to others. That is what soft skills cover.

And no, being friendly, smiling or outgoing is not enough to make you someone with strong behavioural skills.

The hiring paradox: we select for skills, then discover behaviours

Look at how most hiring still works.

It starts with a CV. We check degrees, experience, certifications and technical skills. Then comes the interview.

The candidate walks through their background, shares a few wins, explains that they are autonomous, adaptable, a good listener and a team player. Perfect. Everyone is reassured.

Except what we have mostly checked is their ability to talk about themselves. Not necessarily their ability to act in a real situation.

Someone can shine in an interview and struggle when they have to handle a conflict. Someone else can be less comfortable selling themselves, yet remarkable at bringing a team together or making complex decisions.

The problem isn't that recruiters ignore soft skills. It's that they sometimes confuse them with the impression a candidate leaves. And that impression can be misleading.

A Leadership IQ study of 20,000 hires across 312 organisations attributed 89% of the hiring failures it studied to behavioural factors rather than a lack of technical skills.

But it reflects something familiar: you can hire someone for what they know how to do and run into trouble with how they work.

What cognitive science tells us about our behaviour

This is where the subject gets really interesting.

For a long time, soft skills were treated as somewhat vague personal qualities: leadership, emotional intelligence, adaptability, team spirit… Words you see everywhere, which don't always mean the same thing to everyone.

Cognitive and behavioural science lets us go further. It looks at how we process information, make decisions, react to uncertainty, regulate our emotions and interact with others. In other words, it tries to understand the mechanisms that shape our behaviour.

Take an example. Faced with an urgent decision, some professionals gather as much information as possible before acting. Others prefer to decide quickly and adjust later.

Who is right? It depends on the context.

In a crisis, a fast decision can be precious. On a project with heavy regulatory stakes, caution and in-depth analysis can be essential.

A behaviour isn't good or bad in absolute terms. How relevant it is also depends on the environment it shows up in. That nuance is fundamental.

And that is exactly why behavioural approaches matter for hiring: they push us to look beyond declared qualities, at observable behaviours and how well they fit a professional situation.

The most useful soft skills? Wrong question.

Type "best soft skills" into Google. You'll find lists of 10, 20, sometimes 50 essential skills.

Creativity. Empathy. Leadership. Resilience. Communication. Adaptability.

Fine. But essential for whom? For what? And in which environment?

A consultant working alone on a technical mission doesn't necessarily need the same behavioural skills as a transformation director who has to bring fifteen teams together. Likewise, a startup living with uncertainty doesn't work like a highly structured industrial group.

So rather than looking for universally ideal soft skills, let's look at the ones that really make the difference, mission by mission.

Interpersonal skills: working well with others

Communicating clearly, listening, handling disagreement, collaborating with very different personalities.

This isn't just about being pleasant. It's the ability to keep information flowing, build trust and stop misunderstandings from turning into roadblocks.

Cognitive skills: thinking when the answers aren't obvious

Critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, prioritisation, ability to learn.

These skills matter most when situations get complex. When there is no ready-made procedure. When information is incomplete. When trade-offs have to be made.

Emotional skills: staying effective when the pressure rises

Stress management, self-awareness, emotional regulation, resilience.

A professional can master their subject perfectly and lose their footing in a conflict. Conversely, someone who recognises their own reactions and knows how to regulate them can help keep a working environment constructive.

Organisational skills: turning intentions into results

Autonomy, reliability, initiative, time management, adaptability.

For a freelancer, these are especially important. A client usually isn't looking for someone they'll have to guide every day. They want someone who can understand a goal, get organised and move forward.

The right soft skill isn't the one that looks good on LinkedIn. It's the one that becomes useful at the right moment, in the right context.

What if the real question were behavioural fit?

Now picture two situations.

In the first, a company is looking for a consultant to structure its procurement department. The organisation is very hierarchical, approvals are many and stakeholders pay close attention to process.

In the second, a startup is looking for exactly the same technical expertise. But here, priorities change every week, decisions are made quickly and the methods are still being built.

The same consultant could excel in one of these organisations and be much less effective in the other. Not because they suddenly became less competent. Simply because the way they work fits one environment better than the other.

That is the whole difference between looking for the best profile on paper and looking for the profile best suited to a mission.

And that fit isn't about personal affinity. It is certainly not about hiring people who look like us, think like us or share our habits. On the contrary, a diversity of ways of thinking and working can be a real strength.

The point is to identify the behaviours the mission truly needs, the constraints of the environment and the complementarities that help the team.

The best expert isn't always the one with the most skills. It's the one who will put them to work effectively in your context.

Can soft skills really be assessed?

Yes. But certainly not by simply asking: "Are you adaptable?"

Nobody will answer: "No, I'm completely unable to change my habits." And that's exactly the problem. Statements of intent aren't enough to understand how someone acts.

To go further, several approaches can be combined.

• Structured interviews, first. Instead of relying on an improvised conversation, candidates are asked about concrete situations, with evaluation criteria set in advance.
• Work simulations, next. How does a person react to disagreement? How do they prioritise several urgent tasks? How do they explain an unpopular decision?
• Standardised behavioural assessments, finally, when they rely on tools whose reliability and validity have been studied.

What experts in cognitive and behavioural science bring is the ability to identify the relevant dimensions, build consistent assessment situations and interpret the results with method.

Because there is an important difference between measuring a behaviour and claiming to know a whole personality. No questionnaire can sum up a person. No score can guarantee a successful collaboration. On the other hand, a rigorous assessment can add information to the CV and the technical interview.

The goal isn't to put people in boxes. It's to make decisions that depend less on our gut feeling.

We walk through the method, step by step, in How to assess soft skills before you hire.

Can soft skills change?

Fortunately, yes. We aren't condemned to work the same way all our lives.

Our behaviours evolve with experience, environment, learning and the feedback we receive. That is what brain plasticity makes possible: our brain keeps its capacity to adapt and learn.

But not all behavioural skills develop at the same speed. Learning to structure a meeting, rephrase a request or organise your work better can bring fairly quick progress. Changing a deeply rooted reaction to conflict, uncertainty or loss of control usually takes more time and practice.

Above all, it takes an active effort. A course on emotional intelligence doesn't automatically make you more emotionally intelligent. Reading a book on leadership doesn't instantly turn anyone into a leader.

It's practice, with feedback and repetition, that changes behaviour.

For freelancers, that is great news. Their professional growth isn't limited to piling up technical certifications. They can also work on how they communicate, persuade, handle stress or collaborate. All of these can become real differentiators.

Tomorrow, will technical skills still be enough to stand out?

With the rise of artificial intelligence, the question is worth asking. Many technical tasks are changing fast. Some are automated, others become more accessible thanks to digital tools.

That doesn't mean technical expertise will disappear. Quite the opposite. But knowing how to use a tool isn't always enough to create value. You still have to understand a problem, ask the right questions, make trade-offs, persuade and work with people whose interests aren't necessarily aligned.

A tool can help you prepare a negotiation. It doesn't build trust between two organisations on its own. An AI can suggest several strategic scenarios. It doesn't carry the responsibility for the decisions you make. And a great dashboard won't replace a manager's ability to rally their team.

As tools evolve, the way we use our human skills may become an even bigger differentiator. That is also why soft skills deserve better than a line at the bottom of a CV.

At Migbirds, we believe a CV only tells part of the story

For years, the freelance market was organised around a fairly simple logic: a company expresses a technical need, a platform looks for matching profiles, then candidates are compared on experience, availability and rates.

That approach is useful. But it leaves out an essential question. How do you know whether an expert will really fit into an environment, work with the people involved and put their skills to use in the specific conditions of the mission?

That question drives our approach. At Migbirds, we want to go beyond matching technical skills alone by adding a behavioural reading of profiles and work environments.

Building on cognitive and behavioural science, our ambition is to better understand how each person works and the conditions that make a collaboration succeed.

Not to promise infallible hiring. But to give companies and freelancers more to understand each other, and to encourage better-matched collaborations.

Because a CV can tell you what an expert has already done. But to understand how they could succeed with you, you sometimes need to look much further.

What if we finally looked at what really makes the difference?

Whether you are a freelancer looking for missions that suit you or a company looking for the right expert, technical skills don't tell the whole story.

Discover how Migbirds brings the human and behavioural side into professional matching.

These behaviours weigh even more at a distance, where writing, initiative and reliability take the place of presence. Our guide to remote freelance missions looks at what changes, and our sector guides at what each field expects.

For the short version, our glossary defines soft skills in a few lines, next to behavioral competencies, the term assessments use for the same abilities.