What resume skills you need to highlight?

The resume skills of a candidate are among the essential information for any recruiter. These allow them to know what you know and to verify the adequacy of your profile with the position to be filled. So, what skills should be indicated on your resume and where to position them? To find out everything about this, do not miss the next article that we have for you at Talent2Win. We wish you luck during your recruitment and talent acquisition process as a candidate! 

List of the most wanted skills  

When we talk about skills on a resume, what exactly are we talking about? When it comes to hiring, recruiters will examine both technical skills (the traditional know-how), but also your behavioral skills (the new hobby of recruiters, the soft skills). 

Technical skills 

Throughout your professional life, you have developed skills. Your technical skills, also known as hard skills, which are what you can do at work, must be up to the job. They constitute your professional expertise.  

To give yourself the best chance of being selected for the interview phase, your technical skills should be included on your CV and should give the recruiter as much information as possible about the extent of your capabilities. 

Your technical skills can come from your university education, the tasks you have completed in other positions, the training you have received through your training, or the tools you use in your daily life. Here are some examples of skills:  

• Mastering a tool 
• Being able to develop a communication plan
• Conducting a study 
• Mastering the use of software 
• Speaking several languages fluently 

What technical skills should you include in your resume? All those that will match the skills requested in the ad. To avoid making mistakes, you can ask yourself the following questions: 

• What are the main skills requested in the job offer? List the skills you will find on a sheet of paper. 
• What phrases come up most often? 

Compare them with your own skills: what they have in common is what you should put forward in your CV, which will then be personalized in relation to the ad. 

Behavioral skills 

Having technical skills is essential to have the best chance of landing your dream job, but it is not enough. Business expertise is no longer as important to employers today. To be the ideal candidate, you will need to possess another set of skills, called behavioral skills. They are also called soft skills, social-emotional skills, cognitive skills, personal skills, or even human skills.  

What exactly do they consist of? Behavioral skills are all the personal qualities that transform an average employee into an efficient, benevolent and positive collaborator for the company. In short, they allow us to assess the personality and verify that it is compatible with the company’s values. 

What are the soft skills that recruiters value? Some of them are self-confidence, creativity, emotional intelligence, among others. Considered as a real “plus”, they guarantee an efficient and successful onboarding, and therefore a secure financial cost of recruitment. 

You might like: How to you answer the question about your salary expectations? 

Where to put skills on a CV?  

Skills, whether hard or soft, must be easily identifiable. The recruiter should have a good idea of the extent of these by quickly scanning your CV. You have two options for highlighting them in a CV. You can include them in a dedicated section or scatter them subtly throughout the resume. 

Include skills in a dedicated section of your resume 

To be visible, you can include your skills, whether technical or behavioral, in a dedicated section of the CV entitled Skills. Prioritize and rank the information using the funnel technique: what appears at the top is what you consider most important and most visible. 

What is the advantage of this formatting? In a few seconds, the recruiter will have access to a summary of all your skills. The disadvantage? This organizational choice is particularly useful if you have little or no professional experience. On the other hand, if you already have several companies to your credit, a dedicated section could be redundant with the Professional Experience section.  

Spreading out the skills in your resume 

The other method of highlighting skills in the CV consists of subtly disseminating them in two essential sections of the CV: 

• The Professional Experience section for technical skills: when describing your experiences, highlight the key skills you have developed over the course of your career and give concrete examples to illustrate them. 
• The Interests section for behavioral technical skills. These skills can be acquired through sports or through participation in various extra-professional projects. List your interests and give examples of associated skills. 

To highlight your behavioral skills on a CV, you can create a separate box to summarize your soft skills. Without listing a succession of key words, we advise you to give the recruiter details that are both concrete and short. 

At Talent2Win, we strive to align your company’s business objectives with the best Talent Acquisition strategies available. If you want to learn more about the services we offer, do not hesitate to contact us.