How to Write Soft Skills On Your Resume
Soft skills are about how you work rather than the work you do or the knowledge you have. They’re things like listening skills, time management, and attitude. Soft skills are just as important as your technical skillset and know-how and are often the deciding factor on whether you get the job, keep the job, or get promoted. And it all starts with showing them on your resume.
Buzz Words are Dead Words
The challenge with today’s resumes and soft skills is that we’ve all been using soft skill buzz words such as the below for years and they’ve lost any meaning.
Words like:
Dependable
Ambitious
Excellent Communicator
Goal-Oriented
Organized
Self-Starter
A recruiter and hiring manager reading these words on your resume will immediately think, “yea, you and everyone else that applies to this job.” And that is not what you want them thinking. You are unique. You are different. You have something to offer that no one else does.
Simply saying something doesn’t make it true or believable. Think about the best marketing in the world. They don’t tell you the product is the best because they said so. You need credibility and the best way to add credibility to soft skills is to show, don’t tell.
Which Would you prefer?
A) Versatile accountant, capable of multi-tasking and meeting deadlines. Dynamic, adaptable, and flexible professional.
OR
B) Spent 5 years in a fast-paced environment successfully juggling 500 AP invoices per week, 200 collection accounts, and an entire division’s balance sheet reconciliations.
I know which one I would choose. When I read the second example, I know this individual can handle multiple tasks and prioritize - how else would they get all that work done? They’ve been in a fast-paced environment, but even more so, I know what that means because they’ve painted the picture with the volume of work they did. And finally, to make it 5 years in that environment, they must have grit and be adaptable. I learned all of these things without them saying any soft skill buzz words about themselves. The end result - belief!
How to Write Your Soft Skills
Here is a simple way to work through your soft skills.
Make a list of the soft skills you have. You can find a list here to help you get started.
Review any soft skills you notice employers asking for on their job ads and make sure you have those on your list if you possess them.
For each skill, think about when you’ve had to use it in action and write down a short story about the experience.
Think about how you can use statistics, numbers, and quantifiable information to layer in context.
Write a one to two sentence statement showing your soft skills using everything you’ve written down.
Review your statement and ask yourself what would someone else think when reading this and would it help me be more relevant for the job.
Imaginations
Your resume says more about you than simply the words on the paper. We all have imaginations, recruiters and hiring managers are no exception. If you don’t take the time to identify your soft skills and show them in your resume, you can count on them using their imaginations to come up with their own conclusions. Don’t skip this step when writing your resume.
And if soft skills weren’t enough, also consider what else people will use their imagination on. Things like are you tall, short, skinny, fat, old, young. No, those things shouldn’t matter and many of them border legality, but it would be naive to think that people are not thinking about all these items and more.
How does this play out on a resume? Here’s another example that isn’t soft skill-related. If a degree is listed and the date says 1996 on it, that allows someone to use their imagination to guess your age (even though it could be completely inaccurate) and infer other things about you based on that.
