Your resume provides a quick glimpse at your qualifications, and hiring managers often sift through hundreds of resumes to find a short list of suitable candidates. This means your resume must grab their attention, and highlight crucial skills that are needed for the position, and opting for professional resume writing may be the best way to ensure that your resume stands out from the pack.
Our team of professional resume writing experts will craft a resume that emphasizes your proficiency in many key skills, including the following:
1. Hard Skills
Within your resume, hiring managers are looking both for hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills typically are necessary skills and certifications required by your industry. For instance, if you’re searching for a job in the IT sector, you might need proficiency with certain types of software needed for your job.
If the job you seek is in the sales industry, your resume will need to reflect your ability to attain new clients and retain existing clients. If you are searching for a teaching position, your resume should showcase additional specialized training you may have received. Basically, a hiring manager needs someone that requires as little additional training as possible, so that you can dive right in and get to work, and your resume needs to reflect your ability to handle the tasks required by your industry.
2. Problem Solving
Now, we dive into the soft skills, which can be equally as important, but tend to be more difficult to quantify and showcase on a resume, which is why we recommend considering professional resume writing.
Every industry needs workers that are competent at problem solving, because problems and difficulties arise in every work situation, and employers need creative thinkers that can find ways to adapt and handle complex issues as they arise. While you might be great at problem solving, you can’t just state this on a resume, you need to provide an example so that the hiring manager can understand that you possess this skill.
For instance, under the Work Experience section of your resume, you will list jobs you’ve held and under each job listing, you can provide two or three examples of your responsibilities and accolades, and one of these might refer to your problem solving abilities.
As an example, you might describe that you designed and implemented a project management system that increased workplace efficiency by 25%. This shows the hiring manager that you saw that your workplace could be more efficient, so you created a solution.
3. Teamwork
Every manager wants the members of their team to work together as flawlessly as possibly, but simply stating that you are great team player is vague, so you need to provide examples that prove you have the ability to work well with a team.
Often, you can showcase this skill by listing a successful team project under one of your work experiences. You might state that you worked with a team of 6 to create a company-wide project management system or whatever else you might have accomplished within a team project.
4. Leadership
On your resume, you might highlight leadership experience and management experience to showcase your leadership abilities. If you were a manager, be sure to include specific information about the number of employees that you managed.
Of course, if you were never a manager, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t possess quantifiable leadership skills. Perhaps you were responsible for employee training or you arranged workshops and training seminars for your co-workers. While you might not have stood in front of a group and led them, you did accomplish something that led your team to a better place.
5. Communication Skills
The ability to communicate is crucial, but there are many ways that communication might be accomplished. For instance, you might have designed educational materials for a conference or you might have developed a communication system to make it easier for your team to share ideas and collaborate.
Of course, it’s always great to highlight verbal communication skills, such as leading weekly staff meetings or presenting information at a workshop or large conference event. Keep in mind, if you aren’t great at communication, this can be an issue during the interview process, so we highly recommend that you practice for interviews so that you can present yourself in the best possible light.
These are just a few of the soft skills that you might want to highlight. Additionally, you might want to highlight that you are motivated, organized and hard-working without actually using those words. Simply stating that you are a dedicated, self-starter isn’t enough. The hiring manager needs to be able to see examples of your skills, not just clichéd verbiage.
If you are having trouble knowing how to express your skills and provide dynamic examples of your work, professional resume writing might be your best bet. Our team of resume experts can craft a resume that highlights your most important hard and soft skills and immediately expresses to a hiring manager that you are an excellent candidate for the job.
In addition to our professional resume writing services, we also can create dynamic cover letters, thank-you notes, LinkedIn profiles and much more. Our team can even help with career coaching, so if you’ve been having trouble on interviews, you can speak one-on-one with a career specialist and learn how to tackle interviews and make a great impression.