Getting your hard skills front-and-center is key to showing recruiters your core attributes and experiences. That is vital for when they are flicking through a mountain of resumes and choosing who to interview, you need to ensure that those hard skills are highly visible for the few seconds they will look to show potential employers that you’re the right person with the right skills for a role.
Recruiters, HR professionals, and, increasingly, automated AI resume scanning tools are looking for resumes that tick a few key boxes very quickly. If they see the right hard skills, notably; communication skills, time management, examples of leadership or creativity in place, they are more likely to take the time to look at your more subtle skills and love of mountaineering, charity work, or cosplay.
A Block Of Hard Skills Should Dominate Your Resume
Getting your hard skills upfront is key, as professionals will only spend a tiny amount of time looking at each resume, compared to the hours that you (hopefully) put into it, trying to create the perfect resume. So, the first question is what are hard skills? These include:
- Qualifications (school, college, university, technical or business-related).
- Industry awards, certifications, and achievements.
- Role-related skills (specific ones such as marketing, accounting, production).
- Related skills, such as tool or service abilities, management experience.
If you are not too sure if a skill is hard or soft, Reed has a useful list that you can refer to when putting together a resume. Typically, soft skills include business ethics, empathy, reliability, creativity, and communication skills, which can be filtered in as part of the detail about your hard skills.
How To Express Your Hard Skills
Putting together a list of your hard skills, whether for building your first resume or if you’re an expert, you’ll still need to express them positively to make them stand out. If you are relatively young, then your qualifications should be put first as these are more important as recruiters will see your age and look for them.
But, if you have plenty of experience, you can put your skills first in a section clearly titled “Skills”, with the hard skills at the start of any bullet list or sentence, so they are clearly visible. The skills can be broken up into sections if needed, with technical ones, such as SEO experts, leading the way if you are applying for a specific role. Or industry skills, say product leadership if you are looking at more senior roles. Examples include:
- Writing skills: Comfortable using US/UK English, drafting and editing blog posts, white papers, marketing material, and podcast scripts.
- Commercial skills: Built my own B2B business from scratch before it was acquired by a startup and taking charge of its operations and supply chain management.
- Language skills: Fluent in business French and Spanish, passable conversational German, and learning Japanese.
Each skill should have some evidence to back it up, without stretching beyond more than a few lines per entry. One key tip is to ensure your hard skills match those in the recruiter’s job advertisements as this is what their scanning software will use. Of course, lots of professionals still struggle when it comes to creating a resume, and people new to the job market are always looking for advice, fortunately, there is a solution.
How To Use A Free Resume Builder
For candidates unsure if their resume is up to standard, there are tools like Resumist: Smart Resume Builder to provide a professional gloss to your resume. The Resume Builder service is one way to easily ensure your hard skills are as clear and read as well as they sound when you put them down on “paper.”
Resume builder helps improve the overall quality of your resume, ensuring that those busy HR managers and recruitment professionals will get to see your hard skills immediately and are more likely to move your resume to the “next stages” pile for closer consideration.
Resume Builder helps anyone make their resume or CV look great. Users can choose from a series of templates that are designed to appeal to recruiters. There are many finely-honed examples of technical and hard-skills text that you can use to get your message across professionally, using the type of language that delivers maximum impact and will impress the reader.
Free, simple, and easy to use, Smart Resume Builder has helped huge numbers of people get deeper into the hiring process to win their dream job. The service helps take the stress out of creating the strongest possible resume online, making those hard skills clear as glass.
If you have trouble putting into words your technical skills and achievements, Smart Resume Builder is the ideal tool to build a great-looking resume. You can choose from a set of templates that are suitable for your industry, with adjustable colors and styles to make it look unique.
Then, based on what you have learned from this post, you can fill it in or choose pre-selected text examples to edit with your own information. As it only takes a few minutes to apply for a role through most websites, it is only fair that candidates can create resumes quickly and efficiently that are tailored to each application.
The Guide To Business Hard Skills
Whatever job you apply for, you should make sure that the hard skills you put in your resume are appropriate for the industry you are looking to work in. There are plenty of articles and lists about “key hard skills for marketing roles”, which might help you refine your list or give you inspiration for adding fresh ones as you look to build your career.
Also, if it has been a while since you updated your resume, check with industry sources to see what the most desirable hard skills are and make sure they go at the top of your resume. If you have a long list of hard skills, then you might be able to spread them across the cover letter (if one is needed). Or, just ensure they are on the first page of a lengthy resume to make sure they attract attention.
