How to include your soft skills on your resume

Employers are looking for soft skills. In fact, they are listing more and more as part of the job requirements for open positions. More than 6 million job listings on the ZipRecruiter job site in May included “communication skills,” 5.5 million “customer service,” and 5 million “scheduling” as a requirement.

“Even without looking at a specific job listing, we can probably imagine that every job requires the same soft skills: teamwork, communication skills, problem-solving skills, time management skills,” says Gorick Ng, Harvard careers advisor and author of The Unspoken Rules “.

When you’re looking for a job, “your resume is a really, really, really important platform for you to embody those skills,” says Octavia Goredema, career coach and author of Prep Push, Pivot.

This is how career experts highlight soft skills on your resume.

The anatomy of a CV has several facets. One of them is the various job titles in your Experience section. These provide an opportunity to teach some of your soft skills.

“The key here is to be truthful but also descriptive,” says Ng.

“It makes a big difference whether I call myself an intern or a social media intern,” he says as an example. “There’s a big difference between calling myself an analyst and a project manager when I actually do it. There is a difference between calling myself a manager and a communications manager.”

Each of these titles illustrates a different facet of the job that proves you have a certain level of experience. “Even just a word like ‘communication’ or ‘social media’ or ‘project’ or ‘product’ or ‘department’ can give people a mental image of what you’re actually responsible for,” he says.

For each role you outline, think back to your work experience and consider an additional and accurate word or two that describes what you have done and what you can do.

Another piece of resume that could be used to illustrate your soft skills are the bullet points under each job title that give specific examples of what you’ve accomplished. Each bullet point could relate to a soft skill that an employer specifically mentioned in the job description or that you feel is relevant to the job.

Consider some of your accomplishments in previous roles, and then as you write these, “remember that it’s really a crazy lib exercise made up of impact verbs, impact nouns, and impact numbers,” says Ng.

For example, suppose you want to highlight your communication skills and you work in search engine optimization. A bullet point might be something like, “I gave a presentation to 30 of our clients outlining effective ways to use keywords that resulted in an average 30% increase in traffic for each of their websites.” “Led,” “ increase” and “30%” are a verb, a noun, and a number that provide a visceral sense of the kind of impact you’ve had on your business.

The bullet serves to highlight an impressive achievement. Since a good presentation requires strong communication skills, and your presentation clearly helped your clients increase their traffic, you are inherently proving that you are a good communicator.

“It’s almost implied that I should have had the skills to make that impact,” says Ng.