Soft skills are dead—long live ‘skills’

Why retiring a no-longer-helpful label is crucial to making better hiring choices.

Here’s a little thought exercise: Suppose Harvard University, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Stanford Research Center all got together to find out what exactly made a person successful at work. Suppose they discovered that we had two complementary skill sets. One accounted for about 15% of one’s ability to succeed at work, and the other accounted for the remaining 85%. Which skill set would be deemed more important?