Why soft skills are growing on Wall Street

Job posts that highlight interpersonal skills fill faster today than they did in January 2016

Everyone knows the archetype of the typical financier. From Liar’s Poker, to Boiler Room, to The Big Short — intense, hard charging, and loud. But this might be a case of extreme(ly unfair) stereotyping. Instead of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Textio analysis shows that potential Wall Streeters are more likely a sheep in wolf’s clothing.

Language is like the stock market: individual words and phrases are always gaining or losing in popularity. Textio is able to uncover patterns across almost 10 million job posts and outcomes that are added per month, to find which words are trending now.

Recently we used Textio to look at trending words in the finance industry and find out which particular phrases were performing overwhelmingly better now than they did at the beginning of 2016.

For all the talk of the hard-charging Wall Street executive, the phrase that moved the most last year — listening skills. By the end of 2016, finance jobs with this phrase in the description were over 3.8x more likely to fill quickly than they were at the beginning of the year.

But listening skills was one of a huge category of interpersonal skills that were more likely to help open roles fill faster today than in January 2016 on average. By adverting these interpersonal skills, finance companies were able to attract the right talent to fill their roles faster. Who says every financier has to be aggressive?

Some of the phrases in the chart might seem repetitive but the data in Textio shows that the specific words you use will make a difference in how fast a job fills. If you look at the chart, you can see that while “strong communication skills” and “communicate effectively” both shorten the time to find a candidate, “strong communication skills” is overall much better. You may be excellent at writing compelling job descriptions, but it’s impossible to keep 50,000 constantly changing phrases in your head. Because Textio constantly taking in new data, it can find the language change as it’s happening in the market.

Learn more about how language impacts your hiring at textio.com