“Soft skills” are your personal skills, like how you get along with people in the workplace, working relationships and similar skills. Soft skills in a resume tend to be seriously undervalued. Most people barely mention them.
Why soft skills are so important
Soft skills are in fact core skills. Communications is a “hard” business skill, but let’s face it: relationships are part of communications too. How you manage relationships definitely impacts your communications. The soft skills typically work alongside your other skills. You may be great at managing people, for example. You could be a terrific customer service/ client relations person. You can see how soft skills are just as much a part of a job as technical, accounting, or other “hard” skills.
When listing your soft skills for your resume writing, you need to consider your strengths. Are you a real people person, a good listener, a facilitator, a helper, a team builder? Are you a good negotiator, able to work with internal and external parties? Those skills, negotiator, listener, and facilitator, apply to a lot of very different types of job. A dentist and a sales clerk, for example, have to have excellent people and client relationship skills.
Defining your soft skills
OK, now think about this in relation to listing your soft skills on your resume:
Which soft skills are most important in your job?
Try and put some perspective on your most important soft skills – Which of your soft skills are the really high value skills? Which of your soft skills really contributes to doing your work well?
You can see where this is going – Employers need to know you’re not a robot, but a person with the right soft skills who’s going to be a good fit for their business. Your soft skills can be critical in many different jobs, and they can get you jobs, too.
Creating your list of soft skills for your resume
When listing your soft skills for a resume there are a few things you must do:
Check the soft skill sets required for the job! That means get a clear picture of the soft skill requirements. Most people don’t do that. They see “customer service”, and they put down their hard skills for customer service. They don’t, however, include really important soft skills like client relationships management, problem solving, client retention, or other very basic, soft-skill-related professional characteristics.
Show your strengths! The other very high value of your soft skills is connecting your skills to real business values. If you’re a top negotiator, team builder, or manager, integrate your soft skills directly with clear business values like professional resume writing services do.
This is the value of listing your soft skills – You can show your full spectrum of skills and directly link them to your achievements. You’ll find that your resume suddenly looks a lot better, with more depth and seems much more competitive.
