What Skills to Put on a Resume (Hard Skills List + Examples)

The short answer to “What skills to put on a resume?” - only hard skills get directly mentioned in your resume. Soft skills belong in your cover letter or demonstrated via examples.

Get this wrong, and your skills section could end up a generic list that tells me nothing about whether you can actually do this specific job.

But what exactly is meant by “skills”? And how do you add them?

These are questions I get asked a lot by job seekers. To be fair, there’s a lot of conflicting advice out there, much of it outdated or based on myths.

In the following sections, I’ll explain exactly what hard and soft skills are. I’ll show you exactly how to identify relevant hard skills to include, where to include them, and how to reflect any important soft skills.

I’ll also share easy-to-adapt examples that you can use for your own resume.

What skills to put on a resume

Straight up: you don’t need to list every single skill you’ve gained throughout your career.

Modern resumes reflect a target role and industry - ideally focused on a specific role with a specific company. That means, you only need to include skills relevant to what’s listed in a given job description.

The selection rule: it goes into your resume if the posting asks for it AND something else on your resume proves it.

As to where to put them: include a key skills section underneath your summary or resume objective paragraph, with no more than 10 skills listed in order of importance (more on exactly which in the following sections).

The most vital to that role are also woven into examples within job description bullet points to give these verifiable context.

Before we discuss how to do this, let’s look at the difference between hard and soft skills, and which should be directly stated or example-based.

Hard skills vs soft skills

In a nutshell: only hard skills (verifiable, objective skills like project management or bookkeeping) get listed in your resume.

Soft skills (subjective, harder to verify skills like being a team player or analytical) are best highlighted in the cover letter or demonstrated through job description examples.

The explanation for why hard skills are more important in your resume lies in ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’. Your resume is a marketing document, one that showcases your experience, skills, and abilities. These should be factual, demonstrable, and written with the job you’re applying for in mind.

That’s why hard skills are most influential here.

But not just any hard skills. As we learned earlier, featured skills should match that specific job opening. It’s not meant to be a complete career inventory.

That doesn’t mean soft skills aren’t important. In fact, you’ll often see these listed as requirements in job postings. The difference is, soft skills need an example-based context to be provable. That’s why they’re best suited to the cover letter, which is a persuasive document to encourage the recruiter to read the resume, and to add context that the resume can’t.

Take “project management” versus “strong communication skills” on a job post, for example. The first is verifiable: you’ve either run projects or you haven’t. If yes, and it’s relevant, it belongs in your skills section. The second only means something once it’s proven, through a bullet point like “presented quarterly results to senior leadership”. Otherwise, it’s an empty claim and it gets ignored.

Choosing which of your hard skills to feature is a topic in its own right – our tutorial on choosing the right keywords for your resume goes deeper on both kinds.

How to choose which skills to list

Let’s review an example job description. As you skim it, try to identify the key hard skills.

The main hard skill keywords in this job posting are:

Retail Management, Sales Management, Operations, Coaching, Training & Development, Staffing & Recruiting, Scheduling, Labor Budgeting, Asset Protection, Local Marketing, Inventory Management, Sales Performance Tracking.

If you were applying for this job, these are the skills that should be directly mentioned in your resume, both in the key skills section and in your job descriptions (ideally the most recent roles). This is how the reader knows you’re a strong applicant.

Of course, only include skills you actually have. If you don’t have a particular skill and can’t quickly gain it through online training or tutorials, then it’s best to leave it out rather than make a false claim that can’t be verified. Instead, put emphasis on the skills you do have, and support these with examples.

Here’s an example resume tailored to this specific vacancy:

As can be seen, the most important keywords have been grouped together in the key skills section, with the remaining keywords and examples to showcase these included in the job descriptions. A small number have been placed in the summary rather than the key skills section, to draw immediate attention to these high-value keywords.

Don’t stop at the job posting. Spend a few minutes on the company’s website, particularly the About page and any recent news or press releases. You’re looking for two things: the language they use to describe their own work, and any priorities that suggest which skills actually matter most day to day.

For example, you discover that the company is currently churning out new products almost every other month. This suggests a fast-paced, cross-functional environment that works to tight deadlines to achieve these targets. Understanding this context helps you choose which of your matching skills to lead with, and how to phrase them. A Project Manager might prioritize “cross-functional coordination” over “process documentation” for this employer, even if both are part of the role.

Avoid over-doing or stuffing keywords, however: recruiters can tell, and it won’t do you any favors once someone asks you to discuss it.

Because the above job seeker has clearly highlighted their relevant skills right away in the top part of their resume, alongside a strong resume introduction, the reader can easily see that she is a strong fit.

As for the two soft skills mentioned (reliable, team player), these are demonstrated through the applicant’s accomplishments: reliability through her consistent tenure at both companies, and being a team player through the cross-department bullet point. Either can also be expanded upon in the cover letter.

Once you’ve chosen which skills to include, run it through a resume keyword scanner to double-check you’ve captured the most important for that role.

Resume skills examples

To help put yours together, I’ve shared below four sample skills sections for different role types.

Administrative: Office Manager

Customer-facing: Customer Service Associate

Technical: Software Engineer

Early career: Junior Accountant

The last example shows how to weave a soft skill - in this case, quick learner - into an accomplishment-driven resume bullet point, without naming the soft skill directly (check out this FAQ for more quick learner examples).

In general, technical skills (e.g. Microsoft Office, ChatGPT, Salesforce) earn their own section. This helps to de-clutter the hard skills section and summary. Exception: if the role is based around specific tools (e.g. software development positions), the most important can be mentioned in both the hard skills section and technical skills section.

If you’re building your resume from scratch rather than fixing one section, check out our guide on how to write a resume.

Mistakes that get a skills section ignored

Leading with soft skills versus hard skills. Communication, interpersonal skills, and adaptability in a skills section tell me nothing about your ability to do the job. Hard skills such as project management, team leadership, and financial reporting are verifiable and objective.

Generic unranked lists. Resume skills should be specific to the target job, not a full rundown from your entire career. Irrelevant or outdated skills detract from the perception of your fit for the job.

Unbacked skills. Putting skills in the summary or key skills list, but not giving examples of how you did this in your job descriptions? I’ll automatically assume you’re just throwing in keywords for the sake of it. If I can’t find proof within thirty seconds of scanning, that skill doesn’t count, no matter how prominently it’s listed up top.

Buried placement. The opposite of keyword stuffing. If I have to search hard to find relevant keywords, you may lose my attention altogether. I’m not going to dig through multiple paragraphs to find the one skill that actually matters for this role, and neither is anyone else screening at volume.

There’s a fine balance between a resume that tells all and a resume that tells nothing. The hardest for me is a resume that is so full of distractions that I can’t easily see how you’re a great fit for the opportunity. We share nine things that clutter up a resume in this helpful tutorial.

Once you’ve identified the right skills to add, the next step is to make sure they’re distributed cleanly. Check out our guide on how to optimize a two-page resume to structure your content for maximum impact, without under-showcasing or overcrowding it.

Ready to build yours? Our free resume builder puts the skills section where it belongs and keeps it clean, so the only thing left to decide is which skills go in it.

FAQ

What skills should I put on my resume?

Only hard skills get directly mentioned in your resume. Soft skills belong in your cover letter or through bullet point examples showing that skill in action.

How many skills should I list?

No more than 10 or so, listed in order of importance. Much fewer than that and you risk looking underqualified even if you’re not; much more than that and the section stops reading as a targeted list and starts resembling a dump. If you’re struggling to narrow it down, that’s usually a sign you’re including skills the posting doesn’t actually ask for.

What are good skills to put on a resume?

A skill belongs on your resume if the posting asks for it and something else on your resume proves it. Both conditions matter. A skill the posting doesn’t mention is irrelevant no matter how proud you are of it, and a skill you can’t back up with a bullet point, certification, or project comes across as a claim rather than a qualification.

Should I put soft skills on my resume?

No – at least, not directly. Soft skills are best reflected in the cover letter or demonstrated by job description examples.

What’s the difference between hard and soft skills?

Hard skills are verifiable, objective skills like project management or bookkeeping. Soft skills are subjective, harder to verify skills like being a team player or analytical. That’s why hard skills get mentioned in your skills section directly, while soft skills work better when shown through an example in your job descriptions or named in your cover letter.