Key Resume Skills Employers Look For
Miscellaneous / / April 03, 2023
Experts advise not to treat the description of skills on duty.
What does your employer expect from you?
The skills that a potential employee possesses can be divided into two groups:
- Hard skills are specialized skills, without which it is impossible to perform work in this position. For example, knowledge of programming languages ββand databases for a developer.
- soft skills - non-core skills that allow a person to be flexible, work effectively in a company, develop, and so on.
Unfortunately, there are no universal skills in either the first or the second group. All of them must match the potential position. For example, the ability to work in a team is clearly not useful to a person who will work autonomously.
Marina Malashenko
HR director of travel planning service OneTwoTrip.
When writing a resume, analyze which competencies are most useful and relevant for the desired position, then include them in the resume.
If you are looking for remote work or applying for a job with this format, you should indicate the skills that show that you can work effectively and independently, regardless of location. These include communication skills, possession of time management techniques, the ability to build effective workflows.
If you dream of becoming part of a startup, tell us about the competencies that are especially important for such companies. This, for example, high speed of work, the ability to quickly adapt and adapt to new conditions.
How to indicate profile skills
They are of interest to the employer in the first place. Work experience, knowledge of tools, knowledge of the professional field, and so on, matter here. Sometimes candidates do not consider it necessary to list what they can do. It seems that everything is obvious: the cook cooks, the editor edits, the sales manager sells. If a person did not know how, why would he respond to a vacancy? But it's better not to do that.
Diana Dmitrieva
Career consultant at Skypro Online University.
Of course, in a resume it is very important to focus the employer's attention on core skills, especially in relation to the requirements indicated in the target vacancies. Many candidates do not consider it necessary to describe hard skills in detail, considering it obvious. But, unfortunately, this is not the case.
A recruiter in a large stream of resumes spends seconds to quickly separate relevant candidates from those who are not yet worth contacting by keywords. If there is no relevant information, you may not get into the pool of applicants that are interesting for the company.
What to indicate in non-core skills
Candidates also have a different strategy: they diligently prescribe core skills, but ignore soft skills. After all, all these "sociability", "multitasking", "responsibility" and other hackneyed phrases have set the teeth on edge.
However, it is important to indicate soft skills in a resume, just skills should not be on duty.
Alesya Petrushina
HR Manager for UIS Platform and CoMagic.
The item on non-core competencies was not always one of the most important for the applicant to fill out, and the employer did not attach much importance to it before. The age of information technology has changed the situation and allowed the selection of candidates, focusing not only on experience in a similar field and an assessment of professional competencies, but also for such fashionable today soft skills.
For example, successful employees periodically come to our company from completely different areas. One specialist worked as an engineer at a machine-building enterprise, but was very fond of the IT industry and studied in this direction himself. In the interview, he didn't immediately mention it as he thought it wouldn't be an advantage. But in our industry, employees receive in-house product training throughout their entire career with the company. And we caught on to this skill, although the initial portrait of a successful candidate was somewhat different.
How to confirm competencies
Ksenia Andreeva, the founder of the @needsupportbot remote assistant service in Telegram, notes that it is important not only what should be written in the skills. The candidate must be able to prove that he really has these competencies, and the recruiter must not fall for the trick of beautiful wording.
Ksenia Andreeva
Founder of the remote assistant service @needsupportbot in Telegram.
At NeedSupport, we provide 24/7 support services and review hundreds of resumes for ourselves and our clients every day. And here are the rules we have developed for checking resumes between the lines:
1. We read the section about yourself: his candidate writes in his own words and does not hide himself behind standard templates. A candidate with no experience has not completed the section about himself? He doesn't really need a job. Candidate with experience did not fill in the section about himself? Stuck in the last century, where values ββand ambitions mattered less than the entries in the work book. Does he write with errors? I did not find time to check for myself and is unlikely to do this in work.
2. We look at the summary in terms of consistency. The candidate writes that he knows how to structure information, but lists all 208 duties from the job description? Sets the average market salary with zero experience? If we notice even one contradiction, we boldly close the summary: it is bad to deceive ourselves and others.
3. We ask the candidate to contact us personally. We indicate contact details and note what he should write: it can be a code phrase or a link to a resume. If he does not write according to the form, we boldly refuse: he will also miss all the introductory notes in the work.
4. We value candidates for life experience. moved, worked while studying, combined work with a part-time job? Most likely, life forced him to adapt and learn quickly.
And, of course, numbers and cases usually speak more convincingly than just words.
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