When putting together a resume, you naturally want to focus on your accomplishments and the skills, knowledge, and experience you have gained.
This is all well and good but job seekers too often neglect another aspect, another part of themselves. This part encompasses the so-called soft skills, the attributes that make up your character and personality. These kinds of skills need to be included as well, and made a part of your story, to show how they enabled you to achieve what you have.
These skills help you explain how you do things and why you do things the way you do – and why all of this is important to the company. For example, everyone may say on their resume that they have “good communication skills,” but then leave it at that. To make it part of your career story, you need to explain the impact of those skills, and what they mean to you. For example, how having good communication skills allowed you to bring consensus among team members, or they helped you complete a project and achieve company goals.
You can really make yourself stand out by showing how your soft skills helped you to achieve hard goals.
Some of these soft skills include an aptitude for analysis, evaluating situations and projects. Collaboration is another: how you work with other people, or attempt to understand their points of view so that your team can succeed. Another soft skill is poise, the ability to maintain your cool and calm even in tense or unfamiliar situations. Listening is also a soft skill.
Just mentioning these skills on your resume in a scattershot manner will do little to impress a hiring manager. You have to incorporate them into your narrative, showing how these skills helped you achieve the goals and results that you have. The soft skills become the glue that holds together the structure of what you have accomplished, so they need to be incorporated in a meaningful way, not just as an afterthought.
Doing this will present a compelling story to the hiring manager.
If you’re looking for work in Anchorage, Seattle, Chicago, Portland, Lake Oswego, or Tacoma, send your resume to the recruiters at the Opti Staffing Group. We can help you find temporary, temporary-to-hire and even direct-hire opportunities with some of these cities’ top employers. We look forward to hearing from you.