Write A Strong Work History Section
Your resumes work experience section is the most important part of your application.
It should include information on your previous employment with details such as: name of company, city, time of employment, your responsibilities and most notable achievements .
A pretty easy concept to grasp, isnt it?
Simply listing your experiences is not enough.
You should always remember to target your resume for a specific job opening.
Before you start preparing your entries, read the job offer carefully by scanning the requirements. You will find out what skills are required for a given position.
Heres an example job description section that gives off strong communication vibes:
Resume Job Description With Effective Communication Skills
Boutiquette, Fort Worth, TX
- Responsible for entire stock of apparel, also for transferring apparel from stockroom onto sales floor for consumer purchase.
- Communicated with customers and implemented strong work ethic by facilitating their needs.
- Reduced inventory by 23% through category management, stock balancing, creative merchandising ideas and developing purchasing partnerships with outside agencies.
- Achieved company goal of 100% customer satisfaction.
This person clearly has a knack for helping customers through the use of effective communication skills!
Which Skills Are More Important
The debate rages on about which of these two types of skills are more important.
According to executive consultant and Forbes contributor Naz Beheshti, There is an ongoing debate about the relative importance of soft and hard skills that imply a competition between the two. However, they are both necessary and complementary to one another.
On one hand, in a tough job market, job seekers with a proficiency in a specific hard skill may get hired more quickly as companies look to hire people that can deliver value with fewer resources .
However, we are also seeing that many hiring managers are choosing to hire candidates with highly developed soft skills.
Why?
Because they feel that they can always train the candidate in the hard skill that is required to complete the job, but soft skills are often skills that cannot necessarily be taught.
So what does this mean for you?
How Should Skills Be Formatted
The resume skills list on your resume should be formatted as a bulleted list or as a string of skills inside of a paragraph. Above this list should be a headline, saying skills.
Always have a separate skills section on your resume. Never include individual skills in the resume objective/resume summary.
Mentioning soft skills through the cover letter is okay. Though, keep it focused on storytelling rather than listing the skills in a bulleted list.
Here are the two methods for including skills as its own section on the resume.
Skills
Alternatively, it can look like this:
Skills
Communication skills, teamwork, problem-solving, project management, cloud computing.
Which format to pick?
Choose the format that best suites the style of resume that you’re building. The skills section assumes you’re building a traditional resume format . If you’re building a functional resume or a CV, don’t follow either of these formats.
When to use an “Additional Skills” section
If you have a significant amount of experience in your industry but lack specific technical skills required for the position. Then an “Additional Skills” might be best. Here is how that should look.
Additional Skills
- Excellent communication skills
When to use a “Technical Skills” section
A technical skills section is perfect for engineers, software engineers, or other highly technical jobs. Usually, where the job requirements list multiple hard skills.
Here is how a technical skills section should look.
Technical Skills
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How To Discover Skills The Company Values
You need to use the job description to customize your resume skills and work history sections. But dont stop there. Research the employer to gain insight into the workplace culture and company values. You may discover additional qualities that would be prized by the employer.
If you know someone who works at the company, or has in the past, reach out to ask about the workplace culture and what the employer considers important in its workers. Also check websites such as Glassdoor and Fairygodboss for company reviews by employees and former employees.
The companys website can tell you a lot, too. Reading the About Us page is typically a good place to begin.
For instance, in a section called Living our values, IBM includes the following:
- Dedication to every clients success
- Innovation that matters for our company and for the world
- Trust and responsibility in all relationships
If you were applying for a job at IBM, you would want to consider what soft skills you possess that fit this framework customer service, attentiveness, initiative and loyalty and weave them into your resume.
Here at Robert Half, we focus on and promote our four LEAD principles. They are:
- Leadership by Example
- An Openness to New Ideas
- Dedication to Excellence
If youre applying for a job at Robert Half, you might highlight skills that speak to your leadership, drive and diligence, as well as your confidence and ability to collaborate.
How To Put Skills On A Resume
Hiring managers look for two types of key skills. Soft skillthis s and hard skills. It’s ideal to list both types of skills. When reading a job description, here is what a requirements list might look like.
Job requirements
- Ability to coordinate with sales and marketing leaders.
- Strong comprehension of the Adobe Creative Suite.
When we look at that requirements list, there are the two types of skills listed.
“Ability to coordinate with sales and marketing leaders.” This indicates a type of soft skill required. Coordination, communication, and cross-functional leadership come to mind.
Try to read through the job description and match what the hiring manager has listed in the requirements along with the most relevant skills from the lists below.
“Strong comprehension of the Adobe Creative Suite.” This indicates a type of hard skill that’s required. Not only computer technology and software. But also a specific type of software. In this circumstance, you might want to list “Adobe Creative Suite” as your skill.
Most job descriptions tend to list these insights. If they aren’t listed, it’s okay to contact the hiring manager or recruiter and ask for more detail about the position before submitting a resume. Indicating to the manager that the job ad was limited.
Pro tip: Always highlight career achievements or metrics that show career success on your resume. All the skills mentioned at the bottom of the resume will help to tell a story of “how” the successes happened.
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How To Include Skills On A Resume
For every role you apply to, tailor the skills section of your resume so that the information included matches the skills mentioned in the job description.
You can also weave in your skills in the experience section, as you describe the tasks and responsibilities of roles you’ve held in the past.
The keyword skills that you include in your resume and cover letters will help your job application materials get selected by the automated parsing systems employers often use to select applicants to interview. You should also be prepared to mention your most relevant skills during job interviews.
Hard Skills Vs Soft Skills
Employers are looking to hire employees who have the right mix of two different types of skills: soft skills and hard skills.
Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills
Hard Skills11. Storage systems and management12. Programming languages
Hard skills are technical knowledge or training that you have gained through any life experience, including in your career or education.
Soft Skills11. Willingness to learn12. Empathy
Soft skills are personal habits and traits that shape how you work, on your own and with others.
Hard skills are abilities specific to the job and/or industry. Generally, these are more technical skills that you learn in school, certification programs, training materials or experience on the job. Hard skills might include proficiency in things like:
- Software
- Foreign languages
- Operating certain equipment or machinery
Soft skills, on the other hand, are abilities that can be applied in any job. Often, soft skills may be referred to as people skills or social skills and include proficiency in things like:
- Communication
- Time management
- Leadership
Hard skills are usually teachable while soft skills are much harder to develop because they are typically personality traits and, therefore, extremely valuable to employers. In most cases, your soft skills can enhance your hard skills. For example, if youre a detail-oriented software developer skilled in a computer programming language, youll likely be able to catch errors and correct issues in the code you and your team create.
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Tailor Your Skills To The Company/position
As you may have read in our other blog articles, it is always very important to tailor your job interview to the company and position you are interviewing with/for (for a more in depth look at our Tailoring Method article. This includes your resume and the skills you include on your resume as well!
As we mentioned before, the company will have a specific set of skills that they will require the successful candidate to have in order to do the job to their standard.
So as you might have guessed, it is absolutely essential that these skills make an appearance on your resume.
You need to spend some more time researching the company, and this means going through all of their various web properties including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Why?
Because they will leave clues about the types of people they hire, which will give you a better idea of the skills that you need to include in your resume. This especially applies to soft skills.
Ask yourself this. Do I have a similar skill-set to the types of employees they hire?
If the answer is yes, great!
If the answer is no read on!
And as we said before, REALLY dig into the job description to make sure you have a strong understanding of the skills that are required for the job, and make darn sure you put those skills in the skill section of your resume.
Type Of Skills To Use In Resume:
A Resume Skills can be divided into two main categories
Both are very important to include in your resume.
Additionally, there are two other categories of skills to consider in a resume: job-specific skills and transferable skills.
Just as the names suggest, job-specific skills are those skills that are specific for a certain job or role. They are usually hard skills.
Transferable skills, on the other hand, are skills that are relevant in different jobs and can be carried with you from one job to the next. They can be hard or soft skills.
Well give you an example- an animator has the following skills: 3D modeling skills, communication skills and time management skills. If he/she decides to change their career, 3D modeling skills wont be useful anymore.
Before we continue, lets first look at the differences between hard skills and soft skills.
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Why Is Listing The Right Skills So Important
Listing the right skills in your resume will:
- Get you past the ATS screening.
- Draw the recruiters attention for longer than 7 seconds.
- Land you the interview.
The strength of your resume depends on your professional and personal skills.
Its not about putting any skills in the skills section of a resume.
And its not about listing only the top skills either
Its about tailoring your entire resume and including key skills that are relevant to the position.
The Best Font Size For A Resume
The size font you use on a resume will depend on how much you have written, as you need your content to fill up one entire page. A good place to start is using 16pt for your name, 12pt for your section headers, and 11pt for the body of your text. Experiment conservatively until your one-page resume looks complete.
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Skills To Put On A Resume
“Skills” are generally understood to be the things you are good at, but you should be highly selective of which skills you include in your resume. This is because both the job you are applying for and the company you will interview at have very specific skill requirements. With a tailored set of skills, your resume will stand out.
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Why Do I Need A Skills Section
The whole point of keeping your resume concise is to allow for a recruiter or hiring manager to figure out the value you could create for the company after just a quick skim. With that in mind, having a section that basically spells out your hard skills makes a lot of sense,
Your skills section should actually be rather redundant. Ideally, a close read of your experience section should get across all your soft and hard skills. But the reason the skills section exists is because a resume so rarely gets a close read on a first pass. Considering the limited amount of time recruiters typically spend on a resumeabout six secondsa bit of repetition might actually be good. So cover your bases and put your skills in your bullet points and in a skills section. You never know what kind of reader youre going to get.
Another reality of the job application process that this section addresses is the ubiquity of applicant tracking systems . Keyword scanning is one way an ATS flags resumes for closer review, and a skills section, conveniently, can serve as an extra block of relevant keywords.
Overall, your resume skills section gives your application a nice optimization bump for both the human and digital review process.
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Review The Job Description And Research The Company
Though you may have several different areas of strength, include only those that are relevant to the job. Recruiters often have limited time when reviewing resumes, so its best to keep your skills section specific and concise. Once you move on to the interview phase, youll have the opportunity to elaborate on additional skills not mentioned on your resume.
Start by reviewing the job description and making note of any required skills or abilities that match your own. In addition to job requirements, consider the description of the company and its culture.
For example, a job description for a medical assistant may require proficiency in electronic medical records software and scheduling programs. It may also share that the company values teamwork and patient satisfaction. In this case, the best skills to put on a resume might include the following:
- Electronic medical records systems
- Interpersonal communication
- Customer service
If you dont see any clues about company culture listed in the job description, check out Indeed Company Pages or review the employers website for additional information.
How Do I Figure Out The Right Combination Of Skills To Include On My Resume For A Particular Job Application
Check the answer key! That is, print out the job description of the role youre interested in and take a highlighter to it , marking any skills you see listed that you have. Then, make sure these skills are listed on your resume. For example, heres a job description with some of the key skills bolded:
Email Marketing Manager
- Manage email marketing strategy and calendar
- Monitor, analyze, and report on campaign performance
- Improve campaign success throughconversion optimization, A/B testing, segmentation,and more
- Collaborate with the design and editorial teams to maintain consistent brand and voice across platforms
- Work cross-functionally with sales, product, product marketing, and data teams
Requirements
- 3+ years in email marketing
- Experience withcontent management systems and email service providers such as MailChimp or Constant Contact
- Experience withGoogle Analytics, HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, and SEOa plus
- Excellent oral and written communication skills
- Team player with strong interpersonal, relationship-building, and stakeholder management skills
- Excellent problem solving and time management skills
And heres a list of skills you might include in your skills section if you were applying to the job:
Conversion optimization, A/B testing, segmentation, MailChimp, Constant Contact, Google Analytics, HTML, CSS, Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, SEO
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Knowledge Of Specific Computer Applications
Hard skills include technical skills such as computer applications, software, and overall digital literacy. Even if youâre not applying for a job in IT, you should include the computer programs youâre familiar with in your resume skills section if they are relevant to the position.
Listing your exposure to virtual tools like Slack, Hootsuite, or Asana shows that youâre tech-savvy.
Being tech-savvy has all kinds of good connotations like being smart, adaptable, and up to date. Plus, if the company uses any of these tools, it wonât have to spend as much time training you and that means it has saved money.
Choose your computer-related strengths and place them in a resume skills section. If youâre short on program and software knowledge, consider adding other computer skills like your words per minute rate.
In general, you shouldnât include Microsoft Office on a resume. At this point, itâs expected that office workers know how to use word processors. However, if youâre heavily experienced in Microsoft Excel, you can mention your skills in the relevant experience section by explaining how you used it. Better yet, include some numbers to illustrate your point.
Example of using numbers to showcase skills in your experience section:
-
Implemented inventory management system using Microsoft Excel to track shipments and deliveries, saving an estimated 3 hours and $250 per week previously spent on redundant orders.
Why Should I Include Technical Skills On My Resume
Writing skills on your resume is a good way to highlight your personal and professional strengths to employers.
The key to including skills is to list both hard and soft skills.
Certain industries require more technical skills than others.
These industries include:
However, all industries have specific technical skills they look for.
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