Study goals
Describe how the assessment of soft skills is done by the IT executive when hiring the project manager
Relevance / originality
The skills of the Information Technology (IT) project manager are related to the performance of the projects according to the literature. However, the hard skills that were previously the most demanded technical skills in the technology sector, gave way to soft skills, which are the skills in dealing with people. Literature has also undergone this change of focus and, currently, the IT project manager's soft skills are the requirements most sought by IT executives when hiring them.
Methodology / approach
This qualitative study was carried out with the support of interviews with 16 IT executives using the grounded theory technique and the Atlas.ti tool
Main results
The research led us to identify that the soft skills assessment methods revolve around the interview, with subjective techniques created from an empirical knowledge generated by the practice acquired with the hiring process.
Theoretical / methodological contributions
We identified six propositions that emerged from the data analysis and that could pave the way for new research questions
Social / management contributions
Research has shown that the project manager's hiring process is subjective and prone to errors.