HARD SKills and Soft Skills: How to describe in a resume correctly?

Why are some candidates immediately invited to an interview, while others wait weeks for the desired call from a recruiter? Because the more successful candidate was able to highlight his professional skills – hard skills and soft skills – in time and skillfully placed information about them in his resume. What are these secret skills and how do they affect the possibility of employment? Let’s talk.

hard and soft skills: modern personnel terminology

Today’s personnel specialists have come a long way from the usual employees of personnel services. And they select candidates according to progressive modern methods. It is the assessment of professional skills that is the foundation that is crucial. And hard skills and soft skills are two groups of key knowledge and skills that are important for work.

Where did they come from and what should an ordinary person do with them?

What are hard and soft skills?

The terminology, surprisingly, is not new. It was first used in the army of the United States of America in the mid-60s of the 20th century. Thanks to this differentiation of skills and knowledge, commanders tried to raise the level of training of military personnel.

The experience turned out to be noteworthy, and gradually the practice of assessing skills spread to other fields. To us in Ukraine, the practice of evaluating Prof. skills in the modern sense came not so long ago. However, it was she who became a reliable assistant for recruiters in assessing the candidate’s potential.

Hard skills are things that can be learned and tested. Examples are the ability to type quickly, knowledge of foreign languages, knowledge of programming languages, mathematical calculations. That is, any skill can be evaluated objectively.

To get the necessary knowledge, you need to study, and the confirmation is a certificate or diploma.

Soft skills (English “Soft” skills) are universal competencies, they are not taken care of in universities and schools, and it is much more difficult to measure them. Most often, the degree of manifestation depends on the type of personality, character traits, and temperament. They most often include sociability, the ability to work under conditions of force majeure, and a tendency to work in a team. It is extremely difficult to evaluate them in concrete terms, but it is possible to develop them.

Which will win – hard or soft skills?

There is no one-size-fits-all recipe for making your resume perfect. A balance of hard and soft skills is what is needed in each case.

Hard skills: theory and practice
Hard skills, or in English hard skills, are the skills and knowledge required for a specific position and specific work. It’s something you learned at university, in college, or instructions you learned at a previous job. These are professional skills in their purest form.

Example

Imagine that you are a software development specialist. Important competencies will include: thorough knowledge of HTML and CSS, knowledge of frameworks and libraries, knowledge of JavaScript, ability to write queries and many other important professional skills.

But the editor of an online publication needs completely different skills: his area of interest is drawing up content plans, distributing tasks among authors, editorial work, knowledge and ability to use genre stylistics.

A translator must master the language and translation techniques – and this is what marks his usefulness as a specialist. That is, regardless of the company, the requirements for a specialist in a certain field remain unchanged – what are hard skills that guarantee successful professional activity.

Recommendation. Submitting a resume for a job that requires mostly hard skills and professional knowledge? Place a block with their list at the beginning of the resume. So the recruiter will immediately notice important information and invite you to an interview.

So, hard skills are characterized by:

• a list of knowledge and skills that can be objectively assessed and verified;
• availability of education documents;
• certificates about the level of complexity of certain knowledge.

Soft skills: personality as a center
Soft skills (or, in other words, flexible, soft skills) are situational skills, knowledge, character traits that can be used in any job. They help not so much to be a high-class specialist, but to build a career and form one’s own reputation.

There are no universities, instructions, or courses for obtaining soft skills. They are formed during life, under the influence of upbringing and life experience. For example, someone has perfect self-control since childhood, and someone is forced by circumstances to learn to control their emotions over time.

The most frequent and in-demand flexible competencies are:

ability to work in a team;

• critical thinking;
• leadership;
• creativity;
• ability to meet deadlines;
• responsibility and discipline.

These skills are needed in any field, but it takes more time and patience to develop them.

A tip (few people know about it and apply it, but it can make you stand out among other applicants): you should not just list the traditional “communication, ability to overcome stress, punctuality” in the column of personal qualities. HR will not even read further – everyone writes the same thing.

Select a separate paragraph with vital information examples that confirm that you have these same characteristics. For example: “I am diplomatic (-na). At a previous job, my colleagues and I had such a conflict of interests. After getting into the situation, I decided it as follows.”

Which skills are more important?

There is no universal recipe, but there are three categories of professions that differ in the ratio of soft and hard skills:

When professional skills and knowledge are more important: they mainly include specialists of theoretical orientations, as well as developers, designers, engineers. The success of work in general often depends on their professional skills. But the ability to communicate is sometimes not important at all.

Certain professions require a balance of hard and soft skills. These are lawyers and economists, teachers and doctors. The way they interact with the environment is no less important than their professional competences.

Professions in which soft skills take a leading position: sales, marketing, creativity. Overall success depends on the ability to communicate and build relationships in these industries. The ability to listen, speak, and attract attention guarantees 90% of success.

Important: HR experts agree: social, or software, competencies are the benefits of the future. Over time, even in theoretical disciplines, the one who knows how to communicate and understands teamwork will be more successful. And he, most likely, will make more progress in career advancement.

What affects career success

The results of a joint study by the Carnegie Mellon Foundation and the Stanford Research Institute indicate that the success of managers in Fortune 500 companies is 75% dependent on soft skills, while hard skills occupy only 25%. We conclude that “soft” skills have a greater influence on career development. You can hone the writing of software codes to automatism, but only the ability to interact in a social environment will help such a programmer become the head of a software sales company.

So, do you want to improve and advance? Don’t stand still. Improve yourself. Attend educational programs, courses, seminars to improve your hard skills.

And take care of universal competencies at trainings, personal growth groups, and don’t forget about self-education and development. And then your chances of promotion will be much closer.