Candidates' academic qualities, rather than their social skills, become the primary employers choice

Here is my latest essay on IELTS Writing Task 2. Please be free to leave your feedbacks on my essay. Thanks in advance.
Nowadays, some employers think academic qualities are more important than life experience and personal qualities when they choose employees.
Why does this take place? And is this a negative or positive development?

ACADEMIC QUALITIES OR PERSONAL QUALITIES

In the job of recruitment, it seems common that candidates' academic qualities, rather than their social skills, have increasingly become the primary concern among many employers. While the trend is justifiable to some extent, I would argue that it would do more harm than good in overall.

The explanation behind this trend might involve a notion that job applicants who did well in educational institutions would also perform competently in workplaces. In other words, staffers possessing excellent academic records are believed to be more effective at work than those with ordinary academic performance. Given the fact that many employers tend to rush through things these days to ensure an advantageous position in the face of stiff competition, hence, they would be beneficial as more individuals with outstanding academic qualities are hired for the job.

Although the role of academic qualities in term of staff recruitment is undeniable, this is not a sufficiently sound reason to ignore the importance of character traits and interpersonal skills when it comes to work. To be more specific, personal attributes, such as life experience and social skills, are truly essential in workplaces as they could help finding, attracting and retaining clients for businesses. Given the fact that modern market offers consumers an unlimited number of choices through technologies, hence, customer service is often what influences the choice to use a particular business. Besides, without soft skills, hard skills (academic qualities) alone are not enough to be truly effective. For example, a salesperson with excellent academic knowledge might have little success if he or she does not have the interpersonal skills needed to close deals and retain clients.

In conclusion, while there is an understandable reason for the trend of giving emphasize academic qualities rather than personal qualities, I believe that it would be a negative development in long run.

Can, your opinion about this being a negative development should have been given in the opening paraphrase and restated in the closing summary. Your opening summary is not really accurate in its prompt restatement because you did not offer a direct response to the questions being indicated. This is a direct response essay and as such, you are expected to provide a simple, single sentence response to each question because that will serve as the topic for and outline of your discussion presentation.

In the second paragraph, the following line is incomplete:

Given the fact that many employers tend to rush through things these days to ensure an advantageous position in the face of stiff competition, hence, they would be beneficial as more individuals with outstanding academic qualities are hired for the job.

This presentation sounds like it should have had the reasoning sentence before the "Given..." sentence. There is a missing subject in the presentation. It lacks clarity and coherence. In other words, it doesn't make any sense as a part of the paragraph. Additionally, you left the essay as an open ended presentation because, rather than presenting a summary of the discussion, you continued the discussion with an under developed personal opinion. So the essay clearly doesn't come together as an informative presentation.

You should be happy to know thought that your reasoning paragraphs, save for the problematic presentation I quoted above, depicts that you clearly understood the discussion topic and knew how to present your reasoning and supporting elements to a certain degree. Keep that up. It will help you score better in the actual test.