My mom and I have both been in positions that required training new hires. We both have come to the agreement that we’d prefer to hire someone with “people-skills” who needed technical training, rather than someone with lots of technical skills but who isn’t as good with people.
People with both people-skills and a solid work ethic are amazingly hard to find.
Does you judgment of people skills include hiring only those who can agree with you on every point, or those who may disagree with a small point during an interview but have the polite poise and confidence to back up their opinions during that said interview?
One of the earlier posters mentioned the problems with hiring at many companies were women run HR departments who reject some applicants out of hand because their own subjective emotional reaction to them was negative, not because they were doing anything wrong or had no real people skills.
In my experience, a judgment of “people skills” can be extremely subjective and unconsciously governed by the moods of the examiners. True, some habits and behaviours of applicants can obviously be no brainers in terms of rejecting them but I saw one person rejected because the examiner in question just had a “bad feeling about that person”. Luckily that examiner got over ruled by a higher up and the person in question got hired and was a model employee last I heard. Even our “gut instincts” can be wrong sometimes if we are not personally in touch with why we dislike or reject the people we do in our lives and work!