Are soft skills the most important in a job?

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I worked in the high school library for 2 years so I thought that I would at least get an interview if I applied at the public library. The public library has minimum wage positions for high school and college students. I would be doing everything that I did in the school library. Because of that experience, I applied for the position. The library had my application for a few months until I received a rejection letter in the mail.

I thought that I would at least get an interview because of my experience which shows that I know how to do the job, but I was wrong. Maybe it is because I don't have much soft skills.

I started working with vocational rehab to help find a job. The person that I was assigned to is very negative about my career choices for after college and always mentions soft skills. He constantly tells me to work on them even though I have tried.

Soft skills???

Unfortunately, yes. It's the current paradigm that you have to sell yourself, i.e. make people trust you, like you and feel good about their decision to work with you.
And you have to pretend that this is NOT what you're doing, otherwise you're breaking a social contract.

However, they couldn't have evaluated your soft skills just by looking at your application. There are many possible reasons for what happened in this instance.

I disagree--just so long as you don't outright annoy others, there are many jobs where your "soft skills" are near irrelevant. If you're a janitor it matters how well you clean. If you're a factory worker, your error rate matters. If you're a researcher, it matters whether you can publish good research and explain your work to people who can give you grant money. Communication is always a useful skill, but in many jobs, if you're incompetent, you won't be keeping the job unless you've got one heck of a silver tongue. Most bosses will be happy to keep a dependable, competent, socially awkward worker who doesn't bother anybody else and gets the job done.

Depends on the job. Selling is out. Phones, out. Cash registers, out. But hand skills, late-night shifts. Of course it's getting through the interview. I tried a library job once, thought it would be wonderful filing books but I came off too weird, too bad. The only "people skill" job I ever succeeded at was mental health counseling. My low emotional temperature was an asset there.

Janitors get NO love! I don't know why. I got burned out from nursing so I quit and became...a janitor. Back then my apartment was only $430 a month so I could've afforded it. Now, at $850 a month, I have no choice but to work in nursing.

<---Wants to give a shout out to janitors worldwide!

I was a bigger pimp/show pony while doing research work, than I ever was in art school. Everyone has data and is grinding away in the lab. Poster sessions, schmooze, schmooze, schmooze in between our late night number crunching.

My advisor got rid of the Aspie like grad students in our group. He said he could turn a social butterfly into a decent PhD chemist. The Aspies he considered sunk in the water because we had so many meetings, and socializing nonsense to do. Plus we all worked in groups along with researching our own projects. A lone wolf didn't last long.

Think pharmacy reps. Many a time I felt the 60 year old guys were looking at my chest, and couldn't careless about our topic during my poster sessions. If looking at my C cups got us a partner to collaborate with, I guess it was worth it. Sigh.

So, yeah, the days of the geeky science nerd are over.

Depends on the kind of a job you do, but usually - and unfortunatelly - soft skills are very important.

As you didn't even get an interview (where they'd experience these skills), your "soft skills" are unlikely to have anything to do with you not getting an interview. You may want to polish and rewrite your CV and application letters.