According to Dr. Arnsten, professor in Neuroscience at Yale University, people have a shorter attention span due to stress post pandemic. Hence, managers have a shorter attention span in reading piles of resumes on their computers.
Not to mention the stricter guidelines that the company might have set before recruitment, picking only the best among the best.
Applying for a new job became more difficult during these times. You have little time or opportunity to make it to the cut, or else your resume would end up in the recycle folders.
To catch the attention of hiring managers, you must be able to come up with a superb resume that contains all the qualities they are looking for. Getting interested? Don’t go away and keep reading as we reveal the must-haves of a standout resume.
Essential Social Skills That Must Be Added to Your Resume
Social skills or Interpersonal skills allow us to communicate and interact with other people efficiently. These skills involve those non-verbal aspects such as emotional intelligence and active listening.
Social skills are the first must-haves in your resume. Don’t forget to include the social skills you are good at, so hiring managers would definitely see you as a strong candidate for their job position.
Whether you are talking to a potential client, mingling with your officemate, or understanding people, these interpersonal skills will help you ace any battle involving people. Here are some of the skills that you may pick or decide on your resume:
1. Empathy
Have you once sympathized with your friend who wasn’t able to land on his first job yet? Are you compassionate with the people around you? If yes, start writing this trait in your resume because you might be the one that the manager is looking for.
Empathetic people are needed in the office because they have the sincerest care that relieves challenging times.
Compassionate people are most likely to have the potential to become good leaders because they understand and interpret people’s emotions and harness those feelings to create a tornado of possibilities.
2. Active Listening
Active listening can be viewed by many applicants as an unneeded skill because everyone can listen; however, not everyone is willing to listen. Active listening involves your full attention to the speaker for you to show empathy.
In the workplace, active listeners play a vital role in hearing out instructions from the manager and interpreting them to perform practical actions.
For example, suppose the boss says that the company will undergo an economic recession. In that case, active listeners won’t just hear the report but think of creative solutions that will help the company.
Remember that the first step in finding a solution is identifying the main problem, but you can’t if you don’t know how to actively listen.
3. Emotional Intelligence
If you are the type of person who can manage and understand emotions very well, you can be regarded as emotionally intelligent.
People that can work on their emotions are linked to good leadership skills. The more you know, the more you can create solutions that will dissipate the stress in the workplace.
Hiring managers are looking for emotionally intelligent individuals because they can manage stress on their own. Stress can negatively impact work ethics, but emotionally intelligent individuals can remain intact to their work.
4. Conflict Resolution
Conflict resolution is perhaps one of the most important interpersonal skills because it allows you to solve problems in the office in your own way. Conflict is an inevitable incident in the workplace that may cause internal affairs.
Hence, conflict solvers are highly demanded during the hiring process. Conflict may affect productivity in the office using unsolicited information-sharing like gossips and scandals.
5. Writing Communication
Social skills involve all types of skills involving interaction with others. Writing communication involves business writing, client persuasion, and report making.
If you are good at conveying messages through writing, then this is another add-on to your resume. Hiring managers like people who can effectively write, given that this pandemic has only allowed virtual interaction.
Virtual Work Skills That Must Be Added to Your Resume
The pandemic has caused companies to shift into a skeletal work operation. Some people who are not in the office are either tasked to do virtual works or nothing at all.
Hence if you are applying for a job that does not require you to attend the physical office, here are some of the skills that you might add to your resume:
- Self-Motivation. Working in a virtual office has a lot of distractions. Assuming that you have no personal office area in your house, the distraction of social media, the internet, movies, and sleeping are always on the side. Often, the focus is compromised since the things and people around you keep battling on your professional mindset. Hence, having a solid motivation could help you fight these disturbances.
- Adaptability. When your internet was suddenly lost, you will find a way to connect to your laptop with your mobile data; that is adaptability. During virtual set-up, all the free things offered in the offices should be facilitated by yourself. Hence, you need to be adaptable to deliver your work without hassle. If you believe that you can adapt to this working scenario, add this to your resume
- Digital Competency. Don’t know how to enter a video conference? You should be agile in learning how to utilize virtual applications to perform your work effectively. Take time to watch tutorials online in navigating these applications. Hiring managers would love to hire someone keen on learning new tools.
What Teamwork Skills Are Essential?
To be able to play well in a team is a skill developed through constant interaction. A strong team leads to a successful goal. Hiring managers would want to recruit applicants who are team players.
Here are the skills that you must have so the HR manager believes you have what it takes:
1. Reliability
Reliability is perhaps the most essential teamwork skill. Being reliable roots from the trust and companionship formed when members of your team believe in you. Reliability includes meeting the deadline, performing efficiently, and providing solutions successfully.
If you are reliable, you must include this trait in your resume with perhaps projects you were involved in. In this way, managers would see that you have absolute reliable capabilities that don’t require trust-earning.
The more dedicated you are, the more they would give you responsibilities beneficial to your career.
2. Accountability
Reliability and accountability go hand-in-hand as the latter is necessary for you to be trusted. Accountability means taking responsibility for your actions, even if those actions have resulted in a failing note.
If you are not the type of person who would just blame others for your own actions, whether good or bad, then you are accountable.
Perhaps, pointing fingers would only result in higher conflict in the office rather than full admittance of the failure. Remember, the managers want responsible people, not irresponsible.
3. Respectfulness
Creating a respectful environment in the office promotes peace, collaboration, and productivity. Respectfulness includes interchanging opinions without prejudice, using appropriate words for non-work conversations, and acknowledging professional titles.
If you think you pay respect, you may add this to your resume as it showcases your pleasing personality.
4. Collaboration
There is no doubt that collaboration is one of the most critical teamwork skills. If you can create and share ideas with your team, you can say that you have this skill.
Remember that collaboration involves sharing one goal and, thus, consists in dealing with multiple persons with varying attitudes.
Hiring managers pay attention to people who can collaborate well because no one in the office works independently. Writing on your resume that you can get irritated when exposed to many people is a big NO! Managers will tend to see you as someone with low patience.
5. Persuasion
Persuasion is one of the essential characteristics in business because you have to persuade clients to invest in you. In the same way, persuasion can really be effective in conflict management.
For example, if the project leader decided to go in your suggested plan, you need to persuade your teammate who is not on the same page to prevent any hard feelings.
6. Consistent Feedback
Consistent feedback is vital in the workplace to monitor activities in the workplace. If you believe that you give feedbacks constantly, then hiring managers would like you. Constant feedback could benefit the company through creative input to the organization.
Specialized Skills
There are specialized skills in every industry that you work in, and these skills are essential to make you stand out in your chosen field. Aside from these specialized technical skills that you have, you must also highlight in your resume these non-technical skills:
- Creativity. You need to indicate creativity in your resume because it highlights your ability to combat complex problems with a unique solution. The employer wants to hire someone with vast imagination who can help their company find innovative solutions to their problems.
- Problem-Solving. To passively tell your employers that you have problem-solving skills, you may write down the problems you were able to solve. For fresh graduates, you may just opt to write down creativity since you are still in the stage of proving it.
- Time Management. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, operations had been forced to produce more and work shortly to lessen physical contact. Hence, employers are seeking applicants who mastered their time to perform efficiently at work.
- Leadership. Employers have a keen eye for hiring applicants with strong leadership skills to perform well in the office with little supervision. Perhaps you could put your previous job where you successfully demonstrated your leadership skill.
How To Present These Skills in Your Resume?
After we have successfully discussed what you should present in your resume, we must answer the question “how?”. Typically, the skills that you want to highlight should appear in the upper left portion of the paper since psychologist says people usually scan from left to right.
Utilize different font options to immediately capture the eyes of the employer. For example, you may opt to write your soft skills in bold or italicized form.
Other people also like to associate their expertise in the form of dim stars. If you regard yourself as highly creative, present 5 full stars filled with a solid color.
In some cases, people use vibrant colors to captivate employers with their aesthetics. Remember to avoid neon colors as their tinting strength may not be pleasing to the eyes.
Your resume should be concise and efficient. Use bullet points to summarize experiences and education so it can be readable right away. Avoid using too many words as it can lose the reader’s interest.
Conclusion
Landing your dream job might be very difficult; but you must do the things that may help you stand out. Above all the skills you have written in your resume, make sure that you can really prove to them these skills.
Remember that employers want you to show and prove in an actual office and not just tell and brag.
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