Employers read resumes primarily to find out what kind of skills job seekers have. When it comes to professional abilities, you can broadly classify skills into two categories, soft skills, and hard skills. You might find this segregation a bit confusing. However, if you are writing your resume you must have a clear idea about what soft skills and hard skills are. Your resume will impress your prospective employer only if it strikes the right balance.  

The resume writing tips below would help you to understand the differences between soft and hard skills and educate you about the right way of including both in your resume. 

About Hard Skills

The term “hard skills” refers to teachable professional skills that we normally develop at our school and college. These skills are also often developed by working as an apprentice or by doing a full-time job. Hard skills can even be described as skills that are measurable and quantifiable. 

Your resume must always include your hard skills. You cannot prove that you have the practical experience and training required for adorning the position you are applying for without mentioning these skills. The list below includes hard skills that you’ll often find in resumes generated by ResumeBuild:

• Typing speed
• Foreign language
• Certifications and degrees
• Computing knowledge 
• Financial skills 
• Machine operation  
• Knowledge of software such as Adobe Photoshop, Excel, etc. 

About Soft Skills 

Soft skills focus mainly on an individual’s man-management and task management skills. To be more precise, soft skills are primarily implicit skills and are more strongly linked to our personality or character. 

Here, we would like to mention that you should not allow the name “soft skills” to fool you. These skills are as important as any of the hard skills you have. While your hard skills will help employers to understand that you are capable of doing a job, your soft skills will tell them whether you aptly match the profile they are searching for. That’s why almost every resume created by resumebuild features the candidate’s soft skills. Some common examples of soft skills are:

• Communication
• Leadership 
• Time management 
• Problem-solving ability 
• Ability to deal with pressure 
• Ability to work as a part of a team as well as alone 

How to Add Soft and Hard Skills in Your Resume? 

There are multiple ways in which you can include your soft and hard skills in your resume to make it appear more eye-catching to your potential employers. 

The first one involves mentioning as many qualities as possible in the “Skills” section. Ideally, you should choose this option if you are a fresher. For jobseekers with ample professional experience, the ideal place for mentioning the skills would be the “Experience” section. 

The other segment that can feature your skills is the objective statement of the resume. That’s primarily because your objective statement is the first thing the recruiter will see when checking your resume. As modern-day resumes feature a short objective statement, you will get to mention just a couple of your skills in it. This option should be the way to go for you if you have too many qualities and you want your future employer to know about a few the moment he/she opens your resume. 

Conclusion 

If you want your resume to get you calls for interviews, you must make sure it’s informative, but not too long. An online resume builder can make it easier for you to come up with such a resume.