WEB-HH currently lists around 1,897 active vacancies across digital and IT roles, and nearly half of them (47%) offer a remote format — meaning a significant share of daily communication happens in writing and on calls, where soft skills are decisive. By market benchmarks, a technically strong specialist without developed communication skills often loses at the final hiring stage to a candidate with a comparable stack but better soft skills.
What Soft Skills Are and Why They Matter in IT
Soft skills are non-technical abilities that are not tied to a specific technology stack but determine how effectively a specialist works with a team, clients, and tasks. In IT they include communication, empathy, giving and receiving feedback, time management, stress resilience, critical thinking, and negotiation.
Why It Matters in 2026
Remote work changes the nature of collaboration: according to WEB-HH, about 47% of active vacancies in the niche are remote, so most interaction happens via text and video calls. In that environment, the cost of unclear messaging and poor asynchronous communication rises sharply. A developer who can't clearly state task status and a media buyer who can't explain campaign logic to a client both lose efficiency faster than in an office.
Top 8 Soft Skills for IT Specialists
The core set of soft skills overlaps across developers, media buyers, and other digital roles: employers look for people who can negotiate, stay focused, and not create extra friction for the team. Below are the skills most often listed in job posts and probed at interviews.
Communication and Asynchronous Writing
In remote teams, most communication is written. Writing short, self-contained messages, asking precise questions, and not flooding colleagues with clarifications matters more than typing speed. A good async communicator frames a thought so it's understood without extra calls.
Teamwork and Empathy
Empathy in IT isn't abstract politeness — it's the ability to put yourself in a colleague's shoes: to understand why a product manager is pushing a release or why a tester keeps finding new bugs. Specialists with strong empathy reach compromises faster and have fewer conflicts in cross-functional teams.
Time Management and Prioritization
When tasks come from multiple channels and people, prioritization becomes a skill of its own. This applies to developers and media buyers alike, who often run several campaigns and verticals at once.
Feedback: Giving and Receiving
Feedback culture in IT teams means regular code reviews, campaign debriefs, and retrospectives. A specialist who takes criticism as a personal attack slows down both themselves and the team. The skill of giving and receiving feedback is built through practice and self-awareness.
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Breaking a problem into parts, asking "is this even the right problem?", and proposing several solutions is the foundation of senior-level work. Critical thinking is what distinguishes specialists who grow in grade.
Adaptability and Stress Resilience
Digital rules change fast: algorithms update, new GEOs emerge, ad platform policies shift. Highly adaptable specialists pivot quickly and maintain productivity during change.
Negotiation Skills
Negotiation isn't only for hiring — it's used internally to agree on deadlines, discuss a trial period, or align a campaign budget with a client. According to career guides, salary and terms preparation starts long before the actual conversation, and soft skills play a key role there.
Presentation and Self-Presentation
Being able to briefly and convincingly describe your results, explain complex things simply, and rally a team around an idea is what turns a strong contributor into a leader.
Soft Skills by Grade: Junior vs Middle vs Senior
The soft skill set shifts with grade: juniors need to listen and ask questions, while seniors are expected to influence decisions and lead. There's no universal numeric split, but the qualitative difference between levels is stable.
| Grade | Key Soft Skills | What the Team Expects |
|---|---|---|
| Junior | Listening, asking questions, receiving feedback | Accurate execution per instructions, openness to learning |
| Middle | Independent communication, time management, teamwork | Solving tasks without constant supervision, joining discussions |
| Senior | Negotiation, mentoring, presentation, critical thinking | Influencing technical decisions and strategy, supporting colleagues |
Soft Skills for Affiliate and Media Buying Specialists
In affiliate and media buying, soft skills aren't a bonus — they're a requirement for growth. Media buyers and affiliate managers work at the intersection of data, clients, and partners, so their careers largely depend on communication. Active listings on affiliate and media buying jobs often include roles like media buyer dating (listed at 700-1000 USD) and affiliate manager / BizDev — in the latter, technical work takes a back seat to negotiation and networking.
Negotiating with Partners and Clients
An affiliate manager negotiates terms, rates, and volumes daily. Hearing the partner's interest, arguing value, and staying composed in tough conversations directly affects traffic volume.
Managing Client Expectations
Clients want results, but ad campaigns need time for testing and optimization. A specialist who can honestly and clearly discuss timelines and risks loses fewer accounts and wins longer-term contracts.
Self-Organization Across Many Campaigns
A single media buyer may run multiple campaigns, verticals, and GEOs at once. Time management, note-taking, and fast context switching without losing focus are essential here. See current openings in the media buyer jobs section.
How to Assess Your Soft Skill Level
Before developing skills, it helps to know where the weak link is. An honest self-assessment across 5-7 key skills helps you focus instead of trying to train everything at once.
Simple Self-Diagnostic Methods
- Ask two or three colleagues what most hinders the team in your work — and listen without defending.
- Review your last two or three workplace conflicts: where could you have acted differently.
- Rate how often in the past month you got your point across on the first try — in writing or on calls.
- Check how often you take new tasks without asking again an hour after the brief.
Feedback as a Data Source
The most honest source of information about your soft skills is regular feedback from the team and your manager. If the company has no formal retrospectives, ask for one yourself — that's already a sign of maturity.
How to Develop Soft Skills in 2026
Soft skills are trained like technical ones. The main principle is practice in real situations plus deliberate reflection, not passive reading.
Practical Exercises
- Write daily team updates in 5-7 lines — this trains clarity and async communication.
- Retrospect your tasks once a week: what worked, what didn't, what to change next time.
- Take small mentoring tasks — explaining complex things to others teaches you to simplify.
- Prepare for tough conversations in advance: write down your goal, arguments, and likely objections.
- Ask for feedback after major tasks — not in general words but on specific episodes.
Learning and Mentors
Communication and negotiation courses work if you apply the material immediately. A mentor or more experienced colleague who gives feedback on real situations accelerates growth faster than any course. More career material is available in the WEB-HH blog.
Soft Skills at Interviews: How to Show Them
Interviews don't ask about soft skills directly — they test them through questions about past experience and hypotheticals. Employers look for specifics, not self-assessment.
Answer with Stories, Not Labels
Saying "I'm a team player" proves nothing. A story about how you resolved a team conflict or helped a colleague deliver on time works far better. Prepare 4-6 such stories in advance — they cover most behavioral questions.
Ask the Right Questions
Questions about how communication is structured in the team, how decisions are made, and how feedback is given show maturity and interest. That's also part of soft skills. Useful preparation materials are in the salary overview by role, which shows how different grades are valued.
How Employers Should Assess Candidate Soft Skills
Companies hiring in digital and IT should build soft skill assessment into the selection process — especially for remote roles. This lowers the risk of team burnout and losses during the probation period.
Methods That Work
- Behavioral interviews using the STAR method (situation, task, action, result).
- A small test or paired task where you can see how the candidate communicates and negotiates.
- Team feedback after meeting the candidate.
- Checking async communication — for example, how clearly the candidate writes their answers.
To find specialists with the right mix of skills faster, use the post a job section or review employer pricing. If you're hiring remotely, check the remote jobs section.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does a programmer need soft skills if they work with code?
Modern programmers almost always work in a team and communicate regularly: with product, testers, designers, and clients. By market benchmarks, communication skills are often the deciding factor when choosing between two strong candidates. Without them, it's hard to reach senior and above, where half the work is negotiation and mentoring.
Can you develop soft skills if you're "not great" at them?
Yes — these are trainable skills. They develop through practice in real situations, deliberate reflection, and feedback from colleagues. Start with one weak spot — like async writing — and work on it for a few weeks. Courses help, but real growth comes from applying the skills and reviewing results.
How do you show soft skills at an interview without much experience?
Use the story method: prepare 4-6 specific situations from study, pet projects, freelance work, or a previous job where you demonstrated the skill. Describe the situation, your actions, and the result. Employers value specifics over self-assessment, so details matter more than big claims.
What soft skills do media buyers and affiliate managers need?
For media buyers, time management, self-organization, and analytical thinking matter most. Affiliate managers also need negotiation skills and the ability to manage partner expectations — roles like BizDev and affiliate manager often require daily negotiation. Current openings are in the affiliate and media buying jobs section.
Do soft skills affect salary?
By market benchmarks, soft skills noticeably affect offers at middle and senior levels: a specialist who can negotiate terms usually gets better conditions than a peer with the same stack but without those skills. This is especially visible in affiliate and media buying, where the more senior the role, the bigger the share of communication and negotiation.
Where to start building soft skills in 2026?
Start with self-diagnosis: ask 2-3 colleagues for feedback and identify one weak spot. Then pick a specific practice — like weekly short updates or participating in calls. After a month, evaluate progress through real episodes, not feelings. More materials are in the career guides and the WEB-HH blog.