Teamwork appears in three of every four European software engineer job posts

Ask any career coach how to land a software job and you hear the same advice: call yourself a strong communicator and a team player. But candidates do not write job postings. Employers do. So instead of asking what candidates should say, we looked at what employers actually ask for.

At WiseWorld, we study how human skills show up in the real world of work, and how to measure and grow them. That is why we ran this study. We read the full text of 1,000 software engineer job postings from ten European capitals and recorded every soft skill each one named. We then linked each posting to public company data on LinkedIn, such as size, location, and whether the role was remote. This article walks through what we found, what it means for the people who write job posts and run interviews, and what the patterns reveal about human skills themselves.

On July 1, 2026, we collected the 100 most recent software engineer postings from LinkedIn for each of ten capitals: Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Vienna, Prague, and Stockholm. That is 1,000 postings in total.

Behind those postings stood 296 different companies, from two-person startups to firms with tens of thousands of staff. The typical employer had close to a thousand people. Roughly half the roles were fully remote. These company details turn out to shape the language of the posting as much as the job title does, as later sections show.

The first thing that stands out is how employers phrase a soft skill. They rarely name a trait on its own. Instead they describe an action a person will take on the job.

• An action. More than half of posts describe teamwork as something you do: "collaborate with the product team", "work closely with researchers".
• A result. Two in five ask you to deliver: "own features from start to finish", "ship".
• A strength word. Seven in ten add "strong", "excellent", or "proven" in front of a skill, without saying what good looks like.

Plain trait labels such as "team player" are almost gone, appearing in fewer than one in thirty posts (3%). The message for anyone writing a scorecard is simple: the market describes behaviour, so interviews should ask for examples of behaviour.

Nearly all postings (98%) name at least one soft skill. The runaway leader is teamwork, in nearly three of every four posts (73%). Because it is everywhere, teamwork tells you very little about one candidate versus another. The skills that follow are where posts start to differ: ownership, creativity, work ethic, and adaptability.

Here is the surprise for anyone who follows the usual advice. Communication, the skill candidates are told to lead with, sits only sixth, in just over half of posts (52%). Employers seem to assume you can talk, and spend their words on whether you can deliver.

Employers rarely ask for one soft skill on its own. When a post mentions teamwork, it usually names a second skill in the same description. Almost half of posts (45%) pair teamwork with ownership. Roughly four in ten (44%) pair teamwork with communication. That pairing matters for interviews: if your scorecard has a separate box for each skill, you may miss what the employer actually wrote as one combined expectation.

Now the other side of the page. Some skills that fill interview scorecards barely appear in the posts at all. Emotional intelligence shows up in fewer than one in fifty posts (1.8%). Conflict resolution appears in fewer than one in a hundred (0.9%).

The same job title reads differently from one capital to the next. Teamwork leads everywhere, in at least seven in ten posts per city (70%), but leadership language spreads from 33% in Amsterdam to 54% in Berlin. That spread is what separates one market from another.

The pattern tracks employer mix more than national style. Where large, office-based employers dominate, leadership language rises. Where remote startups dominate, posts still stress teamwork but name leadership less often. The table below lays all ten cities side by side, including the second-ranked skill in each market.

Company size predicts how many soft skills a post will name. Mid-size firms with 501 to 1,000 staff write the longest lists, averaging 8.2 soft skills per post, likely because HR teams reuse the same wording across many roles. The smallest firms average just 3.5. That brevity may reflect trust that new hires will pick things up on the job, not a lower bar.

Where people work matters too. Remote posts spell out teamwork more often than on-site posts, which may reflect the need to make collaboration explicit when colleagues are not in the same room. On-site posts name fewer skills overall but still expect ownership.

Job level is the clearest signal of all. Lead and principal roles ask for leadership in more than four in five posts (84%). Senior roles shift toward ownership. Entry-level roles lean on adaptability, the language of learning fast. Director roles talk most about work ethic and communication.

Contract type splits the market in a way that is easy to miss. Full-time and contract posts ask for teamwork at the same rate, but ownership appears in nearly two-thirds of full-time posts (64%) and only about one in six contract ones (16%). Contract posts ask instead for problem solving and the ability to work alone.

One more view sharpens the picture: the freshest posts. About three in ten of the jobs (168 of 563) went live in the 24 hours before we collected the data on July 1, 2026. In that urgent slice, work ethic rises from 54% in the full sample to 61%, while communication falls from 52% to 46%. When a team needs someone now, it asks for people who show up and adapt, not people who present well.

Put the recent posts next to the rare skills from earlier, and a clear theme emerges. The behaviours that decide many interviews, such as handling conflict and reading a room, are rarely written into the post that candidates read. Much of the real test stays invisible until the interview begins.

Step back from the individual numbers and two wider patterns emerge about how we treat human skills in hiring, not just what employers write.

The market writes behaviours, but many interviews still score traits. Posts describe actions. Scorecards often fall back on single-word ratings. That mismatch is one of the clearest gaps in the data.

One post lists many skills, but only one person gets hired. Mid-size companies name an average of 8.2 soft skills per post. The list describes what the role and the team need together. Too often, hiring reads it as a checklist the candidate must tick in full.

Across 563 postings and 296 companies, soft skills are not a footnote. They are the frame around the technical requirements. But that frame is uneven, often unspoken, and frequently out of step with the interview that follows. Three moves close the gap.

1. Match the posting to the interview. If the post names ownership and adaptability, the scorecard should test ownership and adaptability, not only communication.
2. Test skills in pairs. Teamwork and ownership appear together in almost half of posts (45%). Design questions that reflect how employers actually bundle them.
3. Adjust the benchmark to the context. A contract role, a Berlin leadership hire, and an entry-level remote role each call for different language. One generic scorecard fits none of them well.

The teams that align what they write with what they measure will read candidates more fairly, move faster, and lose fewer good people to criteria that appeared only after the interview started.