The soft skills You need to Succeed

It’s natural to want to show off your impressive hard skills when you are looking for a new job. But to succeed in today’s job market, job seekers have to include an equal balance of hard skills and soft skills on their resumes.

New research suggests that even those job seekers who are adding soft skills to their resumes may not be choosing the right ones. In fact, in LiveCareer’s recently released indicators point to a major disconnect between the soft skills that employers seek and those that jobseekers list on their resume.

How to Get Hired With Soft Skills

1. Mention customer service and written and verbal communication skills in your resume, if you possess these. These soft skills greatly appeal to employers and can play a big part in helping you land the job you want a lot faster.

2. Study the job ad. Which other soft skills is the employer seeking? Make a list of all the required skills listed in the job ad and separate out the soft skills, those intangible abilities such as conflict resolution or collaboration. Study the list and determine which of these skills you possess; add those to your resume.

3. Use the job ad to bolster your skill set. Piggybacking off the point above—for the skills you come across in a job ad that you don’t possess, consider mapping out a plan to acquire the ones that are most relevant to your particular industry (i.e., the ones you repeatedly see cropping up in job ads). Doing so will strengthen your position in the job marketplace.

4. Take care to echo the exact language of the job post. This will help your resume get past an applicant tracking system (ATS), which is a standard initial screening process for recruiters. An ATS is looking for keywords in resumes to determine which candidates are a solid fit. So, if the job ad lists “verbal communication skills” as a requirement, don’t write “oral communication skills” on your resume. ATSs can’t interpret nuance, which means that the language has to be a match for you to be considered a match for the job.

5. Create a skills section on your resume. Creating a skills section on your resume is a great way to add soft skills to your resume. Each of your listings under “Work Experience” presumably will be ripe with hard skills you utilized in each role. A skills section allows you more flexibility to mention general soft skills that you possess, such as a sense of humor, honesty, or dependability, traits that might be more difficult to fit into your work section.

An additional eye-opening finding uncovered in the study is the overall mismatch in skills requirements (both soft skills and hard skills) listed in job ads compared to those in applicant resumes. Job ads contain an average of 21.8 skills, while applicant resumes contain an average of only 13 skills. 

All this points to one thing—job seekers must improve their resume writing abilities, and do a far better job of aligning their resume skills to the skills specifications laid out in job ads by prospective employers.