The role of soft skills: exploring the potential relationship with the organizational performance

This dissertation is based on relevant topics underlined in the Italian PNRR (Piano Nazionale Ripresa e Resilienza) strengthening research activities by favouring those aimed at addressing strategic challenges in the workplace. It’s composed by four projects: a systematic review and three empirical studies, which investigates the growing importance of soft skills in today’s job market, with a particular focus on the European context. While hard skills, the specific technical competencies required for professional roles, have traditionally been seen as essential for job performance, soft skills remain a relatively underexplored area, despite their potential impact on employability and both individual and organizational success. The first chapter presents a systematic literature review examining the relationship between soft skills, motivation and employability across European job market. The findings highlight how the broad and often ambiguous definitions of soft skills, along with the heterogeneity of contexts in which they are applied, make it challenging to clearly identify which ones are most influential and impactful. The second chapter is strictly related to a specific request of Ecolab, a global chemical company, to efficient the processes from an HR perspective. It presents the results of a study aimed at understanding which soft skills assessed during the recruitment process may predict employees’ performances. The study also considers how sociodemographic variables might influence this potential relationship. The third chapter, similarly to the previous one, explores the connection between cognitive and intelligence-based assessment tests used during Ecolab’s recruitment process and actual employees’ performances within the company. Last, the fourth chapter following the previous two sections of this dissertation will explore the role of the recruitment assessment on the employment status of employees at Ecolab trying to understand if there is a relationship between them and the employees’ retention in the company. Overall, this work contributes to a deeper understanding of how soft skills and cognitive ones interact with performance metrics, offering practical insights for both researchers and HR professionals seeking to enhance talent acquisition and development strategies. In particular, it helps to investigate the validity of assessment used in the recruitment context, contributing to the refinement of talent evaluation frameworks and supporting data-driven decision-making in human resources management. It’s important to highlight the importance of this study not only for understanding the dynamic behind the employees’ performance and for retention as well. Keywords Soft skills, cognitive abilities, job performance, assessment, recruitment, development.