I've interviewed and hired over 40 people in the past five years, and I'm starting to think that soft skills like communication and teamwork are actually more reliable predictors of job performance than technical expertise. A candidate can be brilliant on paper but struggle to collaborate, while someone with average hard skills but strong emotional intelligence often outperforms them within months. Sure, there are limits—an accountant who can't do math is useless—but in most roles, you can train the technical side, not the personality. So should we really be treating soft skills as secondary in hiring decisions?