From the course: Resume Makeover

Highlight your top skills on your resume

From the course: Resume Makeover

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Highlight your top skills on your resume

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- When recruiters are working to fill a position, they're typically moving through resumes quickly and trying to efficiently find candidates that they want to interview. One of the things they're going to do is look for evidence that you have the skills they need you to have to get the job done well. Don't make them go on a fishing trip through your entire resume to find this evidence. Instead, add a key skills section toward the top of your resume. When writing a resume for a client, I typically create a simple three-column list with a total of 9 to 12 skills, and I set it up in between the summary and the experience sections. The skills you want to list here are those you have expertise in, obviously, and, and this is important, those that you're seeing called out in the job descriptions you've identified as target roles, and the higher up on a page that skill appears, or the more times it's mentioned in the job description, the more important it probably is to the hiring team. Depending on your role, these skills might be soft skills, communication, leadership, problem solving, or they might be hard skills, like Excel, quantitative research, or copywriting. Likely, you'll have a mix when you create your key skills section. Try and organize them visually with it in mind that most people read left to right and top to bottom, so be sure that the skill that you suspect is the most important one appears in the top left position. You'll find two sample resumes in the exercise files, which may come in handy as you think about which skills to add to your resume. I've also included a document that lists common soft and hard skills to help you as you decide which ones to list. And remember, you're not etching this section in stone here. The key skills section is very easy to modify when you're applying for different roles, because again, you want to list skills that you possess, of course, and seem to be the most valued for any given role.

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