When joining a new team, is it better to have the right soft skills and have to learn the hard skills of the job? Or vice versa?

Soft skills are most important. Hard skills can be learned. The majority of my team did not have RevOps experience prior to joining Paycor. We have some amazing Salesforce and Marketo admins that had not used these apps in the past. Hire smart people that are quick learners and teach them what they need to know.

It can depend on where you're coming from, but I lean towards it being better to come in with the soft skills, although there will always be a baseline level of hard skills you need depending on the role. For example, for a data analyst or data engineer, SQL might be a baseline hard skill, but I don't necessarily care about what flavor of SQL they know. In that case, I'd value soft skills like data analysis and interpretation, stakeholder management, growth mindset, and distilling complexity more.