You already know that how you present yourself on your resume is going to be an essential element to determining if you get the job that you’re after or not. There are a lot of factors on your resume that will help you display yourself as the proper professional for the job to a recruiter, and your skillset is amongst them.

Interestingly, the order of your skills on your resume, as well as what skills you list, can actually factor in a lot more than many people would think. Here’s what you’ll need to know about how to list job skills on your resume for the right results.

The process of putting together the skills that you put on your resume and/or job application involves focusing on the right facets and bringing them all together just right. What are those facets? And why does their order matter? The crucial details to focus on are below for you!

Also Read: Beginners Guide For Writing A Stunning Resume In 2022.

You can’t just list all of your skills randomly in a bullet-point list without really thinking about how they’re presenting to the reader. The actual organization of your skills should focus on three main sections for skills.

• Technical/hard skills: The term is interchangeable. You can also further segregate technical and hard skills if you wish. These are skills that you’ve developed and learned as a direct result of your job experience and education. For example, SEO and SEM experience. These are used as assets for a recruiter who wants to know that the successful applicant has got some experience in the field. There often will be fewer in those who are just starting out and vice versa. While important, they are only one-half of the skill equation! So, don’t panic if you don’t have tonnes of these at the moment.

• Soft skills: These are skills and traits that can’t be learned. Either you have them, or you don’t—for example, adaptability and communication techniques. Previously overlooked as being baseless, recruiters now often will peruse these as closely as the hard skills! Why? Because they give a recruiter a better example of who you are and where you come from. These are essential when hiring candidates for long-term job positions! While these can be open to interpretation, listing those soft skills that you think make you a valuable candidate is not only recommended but required by those who have made it their job -- literally -- to consider you a good choice or a bad one.

Not all skills are going to matter to the recruiter, no matter how hard you worked on them. It’s tempting to want to list all of them because you want to make sure that they know how experienced and skilled you are. Having excessive amounts of irrelevant skills isn’t going to help you, though. Resist the urge to “skill dump” and keep your list refined to only those skills that the recruiter cares about.

Not sure how to figure out which skills the recruiter is going to care about most?

Take a look at the job ad in detail.

You’ll see certain buzzwords pop up in the job listing that you can use to help guide you. These are the traits and skills that the recruiter will be searching for in your organized list!

Now that you have a better feel for what skills to think about, you have to also factor in prioritizing those skills that are relevant (in both categories) for our job application. For example, applying for a job in data entry would focus on hard skills such as typing speed (WPM), experience with certain types of software, etc. Soft skill examples for the same role would include the ability to work unsupervised, a good work ethic, etc. These all help give the recruiter a good sense of why you are a good candidate.

Remember that the goal is to always put on display for the recruiter all of the reasons why you’re the best hire or fit for the job. By creating a relevant list of skills tailored just to the position, you are doing that the right way. There’s nothing sketchy or slimy about it. It’s just smart organization techniques that your recruiter will admire.

Related:400+ Action Verbs To Empower Your Resume.

An applicant tracking system (ATS) aids in the organization of candidates for hiring and recruitment. Companies can use these systems to gather data, organize prospects based on their experience and skill set, and filter candidates.

Many applicant tracking systems have the capability of automatically sifting through resumes and applications to identify which individuals should advance to the next stage of the recruiting process.

Filters based on keywords and set parameters, such as number of years of experience, listed skill sets, and other criteria that the organization defines, are frequently used by an ATS tracking system to pick applications. However, some applicant tracking systems are increasingly screening applications using more advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing.

The last piece to the puzzle of your skills is to show recruiters just how you both earned them and used them in the past. When listing previous project or job experience, make sure that you use your description of the job experience for popping in some of the skills that you used and learned from that position.

Most recruiters will check back and forth between them, specifically with this in mind. If you don’t draw the connection, it’s a missed opportunity. Some may even see it as a negative since it’s something that you overlooked.

The other part of not “connecting the dots” is that it is also a missed opportunity to show the recruiter how tailored you are for the position. As they read through your resume, reading your work experience and your skills (or vice versa), having a cohesive picture is going to be wonderful for helping them see just how you deserve to be on the shortlist. Your skills will factor into that better if you connect the dots for them.

A far cry from a bullet point list of skills, the design of your application and resume is going to help the recruiter understand just how they’re looking at. Hard skills and soft skills will play a critical role in forming that identity, and the order and combination of them will work as well. This will help you make sure that your resume is as strong as possible, from the skills you choose to list to how they connect to your work experience and what that all means for the recruiter on the hunt for the right professional.