Your go-to guide to including soft skills on a resume (with examples)

Like technical expertise, soft skills such as collaboration, conflict resolution, and communication are key to landing your dream job. They give employers a better insight into your suitability for a specific role. These interpersonal abilities can set you apart and show how well you’d fit into the team and company culture. 

This article explores a list of soft skills you should consider adding to your resume and provides examples of how to do so effectively.

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are interpersonal abilities and personal traits that help you thrive at work. They focus on how you perform, interact, and work with others, which is vital for a productive and positive work environment. While you can easily evaluate hard skills, soft skills are more abstract and harder to measure objectively.

Learning and applying these skills can increase job satisfaction, workplace awareness, and employability. They will also make you an awesome coworker to be around! 

How to include soft skills on your resume

You can improve your job prospects by adding soft skills to your resume. Choose the right resume format based on your experience so you can best highlight your abilities. Here’s how you can add soft skills to your resume: 

Analyze the job description

Start by carefully going through the job description. This will provide you with your clues. Job postings usually list key skills and expertise that employers seek in candidates. Look for keywords such as communication, leadership, problem-solving, and teamwork. 

Choose the most relevant skills

Select your soft skills that align with the job’s requirements. Reflect on your past experiences and detail specific instances to identify your strengths. For example, if you’re applying for a sales representative position, you can include skills such as negotiation, persuasion, adaptability, and verbal communication on your resume.

Add transferable skills

Transferable skills are great additions to your resume. They can improve your candidacy for many jobs, especially if you want to transition into a parallel or different role. 

These skills include communication, teamwork, time management, critical thinking, and adaptability. Weave them into the descriptions of your past job roles, and remember to back them up with quantifiable achievements.

Use action verbs

Using action verbs can make your accomplishments more impactful. Select action verbs that align with the relevant soft skills. For instance, you can use words such as collaborated, supported, and facilitated for teamwork. 

Where to put soft skills on your resume

Directly listing your soft skills in a section of your resume isn’t enough. You’ll need to discuss their impact in different situations. Here’s how you can do it: 

Resume summary or objective statement

Briefly overview your professional background, highlighting your most relevant soft skills. Based on the job description, incorporate two or three of these skills on your resume. For example: 

“Creative and driven marketing specialist with over five years of experience in digital marketing, seeking to contribute to XYZ Company’s growth. Known for exceptional communication skills and the ability to lead and motivate teams to achieve marketing goals.”

Skills section

To emphasize your soft skills on your resume, pick relevant abilities such as communication and problem-solving. Create a separate section and quantify your skills. Customize them for each application to balance soft and hard skills. For instance, you can mention: “Coordinated and led the IT team to identify and resolve a critical issue in production to increase the efficiency by 20%.”

Professional experience

It’s a good idea to incorporate soft skills into your job experiences. To add them to your resume, show how you’ve used them in real-world situations. Identify key soft skills for the job and recall specific instances where you applied them effectively in past roles. For example, you can say: “Adapted quickly to new software implementation and provided training and support to colleagues, which resulted in a smooth transition and minimal downtime.” 

 “Leadership skills are vital to senior positions. They’re your ability to connect with and inspire people to work towards a common goal. They require you to be kind and compassionate and strive to create a safe and comfortable workplace where everyone enjoys working.”

Education section

Adding soft skills to the education section of your resume involves emphasizing experiences and achievements during your academic career that show those abilities. This helps when you have limited work experience or are applying for internships. Here’s an example: “Served as President of the Debate Club, enhancing public speaking and organizational skills through regular events.”

Soft skills that employers like seeing on your resume

Here are some soft skills you can add to your resume:

Communication

Whether presenting a project update or negotiating a deal, communication is a key soft skill for success at work. It encompasses verbal, non-verbal, and written communication. You can add this competency to your resume by highlighting active listening or written and verbal communication proficiency. Here’s an example:

“Studied and presented a quarterly sales report to the executive team, which resulted in implementing new strategies that increased sales by 12% in the following quarter.”

Time management

Time management is the ability to prioritize tasks and allocate time effectively. It helps you meet deadlines, maintain high-quality work, and avoid the pitfalls of procrastination. Add this skill by stating how you have managed multiple projects simultaneously or how you can set realistic goals and meet them on time. Below is an example:

“Efficiently managed three major projects concurrently and improved time-to-market by 15%.” 

Problem-solving

Problem-solving is your ability to break a bigger problem into smaller parts to solve it independently. Employers are interested in your approach to a given complex scenario. For instance: 

“Improved customer satisfaction by 20% by analyzing and addressing key service issues using sentiment analysis and customer journey mapping.”

Organizational skills

You’re given three tasks from multiple people and must get things done swiftly. Your organizational skills are useful to help you manage multiple tasks at once through tracking, prioritizing, and delegating. For example: 

“Coordinated and prioritized multiple tasks daily, improving project completion rates by 30% through effective tracking and delegation.”

Teamwork

Teamwork, one of the most desirable skills in a candidate, is your ability to work with your colleagues and cross-functional teams to deliver outcomes. Here’s how you can include it:

“Collaborated with cross-functional teams to develop a new product feature, which resulted in a 15% increase in user engagement rates.”

Leadership

Leadership skills are vital to senior positions. They’re your ability to connect with and inspire people to work towards a common goal. They require you to be kind and compassionate and strive to create a safe and comfortable workplace where everyone enjoys working. As a leader, you should also be able to self-reflect, make informed decisions, and communicate them effectively to your coworkers. Here’s an example:

“Led the implementation of a company-wide strategy, creating a collaborative environment and achieving a 15% increase in overall productivity.” 

Attention to detail

Attention to detail is your ability to be thorough, accurate, and identify errors. It’s a useful skill in roles relevant to quality assurance, data analysis, financial auditing, editing, and more. Here’s how you can include it:

“Identified and corrected discrepancies in financial reports, which reduced audit issues by 25%.”

Creativity

Creativity involves thinking outside the box and devising smart and effective solutions to problems. This skill needs constant practice and continuous experimentation to determine what works. Here’s an example:

“Developed a unique marketing campaign in collaboration with influencers and artists to increase brand engagement by 30%.”

Conflict resolution

Conflict resolution is your ability to approach and solve a conflict calmly and constructively. This requires you to regulate your emotions, understand different parties’ perspectives, and act with empathy. Here’s an example of an HR manager role:

“Resolved conflicts between employees by facilitating open discussions and empathetic mediation.” 

Go through the skills mentioned in the guide and add relevant ones to your resume. Make sure to include instances of how you used your skills in previous jobs and quantify them to highlight the impact. You can talk about them in further detail during your interview rounds. 

When you’ve perfected your resume, you can upload it to CareerBuilder to increase your visibility. 

More tips for improving your resume

Discover some in-demand skills that employers look for in candidates.

Prepping for an interview? Explore different types of interviews and how you can prepare for them.

Find out everything you need to know about soft skills here.