A new C-suite survey found most executives want more than AI fluency alone when it comes to hiring and promoting talent
Employers have made no secret of wanting workers who know how to use AI. A new survey suggests that isn't actually what decides who gets hired.
High Point University's Research Center asked more than 500 C-suite executives how much skills like emotional intelligence, work ethic, coachability and problem solving still matter in an AI-saturated hiring market. The response was decisive.
Ninety percent said life skills still matter for hiring, and 75% said they would choose a candidate strong in those skills over one who only brought AI technical ability. Only a small minority wanted either skill set on its own: 7% said the ideal leader in their organization is built entirely on life skills, and another 7% said the same of AI skills. The remaining 87% wanted both.
Nido Qubein, president of High Point University, said the finding that stuck with him hardest wasn't the preference itself. It was the size of the mismatch between what employers say they want and what they think graduates actually arrive with.
"Our survey shows that 44% of C-suite executives and 46% of HR professionals believe recent college graduates are more strongly prepared with AI and technical skills, while only 17 to 18% think they're prepared with life skills," Qubein said. "That's scary. That's very scary."
He argued the consequences of that mismatch show up quickly once someone is actually on the job. The National Association of Colleges and Employers' Job Outlook 2026 survey found a similar pattern nationally, with more than half of employers saying new graduates' skills are only partially aligned with what they actually need.
"If a college student goes to college for four years, five years, six years, whatever it is, and then graduates, and they have all the technology learning that they need, but they're not really versed, they're not really adept, they're not really equipped to deal with people, to communicate effectively, to strategically connect and build bridges of understanding with others, to lead when the heat is on, then they're not going to succeed as well as those who really have life skills," Qubein said.
Roberto Rigobon, professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, traced the mismatch back to what schools are teaching in the first place.
"We are educating the wrong things in school," Rigobon said. "People are interacting less than before. People are less tolerant than before. And that implies that there's less exchange of ideas. So yes, it's sad."
Why AI skills alone don't replace human judgment
Rigobon said AI is useless without the human skills that complement it.
"A calculator is useless without a human," Rigobon said. "Adding and subtracting numbers randomly doesn't serve a purpose for anything. It's when the person using the calculator has a purpose, like designing a building, that the calculator becomes useful. The human skills are fundamental to understand what is the purpose of what the machine is doing."
Qubein said colleges are part of the problem. Most, in his view, are far better equipped to teach a subject than to teach someone how to function well around other people.
"Most executives will say that colleges do a fantastic job in teaching technical skills, technical meaning curriculum matters and academic matters," Qubein said. "But they do a very limited to poor job in teaching or enabling students to master life skills that can arm them with what they need to place themselves in positions of success."
Rigobon made a related point about why that gap is so hard to correct once someone reaches the workforce.
"We know how to teach math and we know how to teach engineering," Rigobon said. "But we do not know how to teach hope, for example. How do you teach a person to be socially functional? I think it's just really difficult. We learn through our interaction with others. It's not that we know exactly how to teach it."
What employers should look for beyond AI skills
If life skills are hard to teach, Qubein said they're just as hard to evaluate in an interview, and hiring managers need a more deliberate process than instinct or a resume. That difficulty lines up with what HRD has covered on the soft skills needed most in today's workplace, traits that are consistently in demand but rarely show up clearly on paper.
"The evaluator must know what they're looking for, and it must be based on data that makes sense, not just on opinion, not just on visual observation of the person who looks nice or talks in a fluid way," Qubein said. "An HR professional or an employer or interviewer, whoever it may be, must define with clarity what it is they're looking for in terms of outcomes, in terms of results."
He described that as a three-part discipline: define the outcome a role actually needs to produce, define the profile of skill and experience that reliably produces it, then test for it rather than relying on instinct or resume signals alone. A strong interview performance, he cautioned, can be misleading on its own.
"That doesn't necessarily mean that they have a vertical understanding of how to behave continually and successfully, and by the way, predictably," Qubein said. "We want people that we can depend on and predict, that their behavior is going to align with the kind of results we expect."
Asked which specific life skills matter most as AI reshapes entry-level and mid-career work, Qubein pointed first to communication and perception.
"Do you know how to listen, not just hear. Do you know how to observe, not just see. Do you know how to connect, not just communicate," Qubein said.
An AI skills question that isn't going away
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report has tracked a similar tension at a global scale, surveying more than a thousand employers about how automation and AI adoption are reshaping which skills they prioritize through 2030. The pattern in the HPU data lines up with what HRD has reported on how AI skills are increasingly tied to promotion and pay decisions, even as executives say technical fluency alone won't get someone through the door.
Rigobon said schools that lean hard into AI and optimization skills are teaching students to compete with the very thing that can already do that work faster. Optimization, he said, is something a computer can already do easily, so a student who spends their education mastering it alone is training for a skill that's disappearing rather than one that's in demand.
For now, the 87% of executives who want both skill sets are betting neither one works well on its own. Employers building emotional intelligence into how they evaluate talent may be better positioned than those chasing AI fluency as a stand-alone credential. As Rigobon put it, the technology raises the stakes on getting the human part right rather than lowering them.
