Let’s talk about resume skills lists

The purpose of a resume when applying for jobs is to describe a candidate quickly, succinctly and to convey their most important/valuable/relevant qualifications to the prospective employer. One common resume mistake that candidates make is including a list of skills, technologies, and/or tools that the candidates feels describe themselves.

Skills lists should never, ever be used on resumes. No exceptions. Full stop.

After reading the statement above, you likely have one of these four reactions:

• Supporter: “Yeah man, right on, totally agreed, skills lists suck”
• Defender: “That’s completely wrong and I’ll tell you exactly why skills lists are the best thing since sliced bread”
• Apologist: “That’s too strong — skills lists aren’t great, but I’ll tell you why it doesn’t hurt to include them”
• Noncommittal: “I’ve never really thought about it, but the skills list doesn’t seem so bad — and it’s commonly suggested by teachers and example resume templates — how bad could it really be if everyone does it?”

Goals

This discussion is written as an easy reference for Supporters and an in-depth exploration of the topic for Defenders, Apologists, and Noncommittals.

This is not an off-the cuff opinion from a single guy, nor am I claiming credit for originating this perspective. This advice incorporates insight from many mentors, peers, mentees , coworkers, and candidates— it simply forms part of my crusade to help candidates better represent and advocate for themselves. This discussion incorporates close to 20 years of personal industry experience including 10 years in roles where I’ve been involved in hiring decisions as a candidate, engineer, engineering lead/manager, business owner, and mentor. This advice also comes after experience reviewing countless (tens of thousands, conservatively) resumes from candidates at all career phases, from pre-first-job-ever to 30-years-of-experience, with the bulk of those being candidates between 0 and 10 years of fulltime employment experience.

Let’s start by reviewing reasons often cited in support of skills lists, listed roughly in descending order of prevalence/frequency:

1. A skills list conveys what a candidate knows or has experience doing/using
2. A skills list is a great way to describe things the candidate knows that haven’t been used in jobs or projects listed on the resume
3. Companies use candidate-processing software to store and search resumes so it’s important to include key terms to make it more likely that a candidate will appear in the employer’s search results or with a higher “hit ratio” than other candidates because of the number of terms that match words used in a company’s job description
4. The most important thing is stacking the deck in favor of visibility for the candidate; the company is responsible for deciding whether the candidate is qualified
5. Some candidate-processing software/databases do not allow searching of key terms in job descriptions, but do search terms in skills lists
6. I have used a skill in multiple jobs and/or projects; a skills list allows me to list each term only once, and it’s important to optimize content vs space used
7. Using a skills list must be a best practice since it’s included in resume templates/examples, commonly taught in resume-writing workshops, high school English classes, college communication classes, technical writing courses, etc

All of these sound quite logical — what gives?

At a glance, the words said in defense of skills lists all sound reasonable and are based largely on ideas that have truth to them. After all, candidates generally have a single goal — to get a job. Nobody goes into this with the goal of screwing up their resume. The devil is in the details.

Premise 1: Clarity — A skills list conveys what a candidate knows or has experience doing/using

On the surface, this seems totally reasonable. After all a skills list is a list where you can put skills, technologies, and tools you’ve used. However! This simple understanding masks the true reality of these lists. And unfortunately, people who use integrity, good logic, and discretion when writing these lists are far outweighed by people who use them improperly. As a result, lists written by well-intentioned authors are judged harshly or simply ignored, resulting in at best a waste of writing time, valuable resume space, and — most importantly — wasted reader time or negative first impression by a reader.

Here are examples of the criteria candidates use to include terms on their skills list, as a demonstration of the wide range of meanings that could be implied. As you can tell, these contradict one another and are so widely varied as to render useless any attempt by a reader to inject meaning into a simply list. This also illustrates why it is so risky for a recruiter, screener, or interviewer to make any meaningful assessment of a candidate based on words in a skills list.

• “I only include in this list skills that I’m highly confident using and about which I can readily answer questions in depth”
• “I include skills in this list that span only the jobs and projects listed on my resume”
• “I mention skills in job/project descriptions, but I also have this list in order to include other skills like things I’ve experienced through my college coursework”
• “In order to reduce text on the resume, I don’t mention any skills in my job/project descriptions and instead list them in the skills list”
• “A job I’m applying for requires experience with certain skills/tools/etc so I use the skills list to mention those; I’ve encountered them in jobs/projects before, so it’s not lying, but my use of them wasn’t significant enough to fit into the description of those jobs/projects normally — I’ll be honest at the interview if asked about what I’ve done with them”
• “A job I’m applying for requires experience with skills/tools/etc that I haven’t used before seeing the job description; I read about them online and completed some tutorials, so it’s not lying to say that I have used the skill/tech/tool — I’ll be honest at the interview if asked about what I’ve done with them”
• “A job I’m applying for requires experience with skills/tools/etc that I haven’t used before; however, I have used things that I think are similar, so I’ll put the key terms in my skills list in the hope that their search algorithm will find my resume — if they ask me about those things, I’ll bluff a bit and mention generally that I’ve encountered them but ultimately worked with [competing/similar tool/tech/skill instead]; hopefully they’ll assume the skill transfers or they’ll think it’s interesting that I have experience with other options they can consider using”
• “A job I’m applying for requires skills/tools/etc that I haven’t used before; I’l put the terms in the skills list because technically the skills list doesn’t say anywhere an actual claim that I’ve done anything in particular with those things — I’ll gamble that they won’t ask me about those skills because I think they don’t matter in this role, or that it’ll be OK for me to learn those on the job”

Now, let’s say a candidate tries to improve their skills list by including some descriptive flavor rather than key words alone. Here are some examples:

1. Years of experience per skill/tech/tool
2. A relative measure label (i.e. “beginniner”, “intermediate”, “experienced”, “expert”, etc)
3. A relative measure quantifier (i.e. 4 stars out of 5, 3 bars out of 10, etc)
4. A relative measure quantifier over time (i.e. a graph showing something like proportion of focus on various skills as a % per year/month/job/project, either as individual data points or as a flowing graph over time, etc)

Each of these on the surface is, again, well-intentioned, and candidates that do these frequently put a lot of personal thought into how to use each idea. However, each is highly subjective with a considerable amount of personal interpretation/implication in the execution of each.

Even something as seemingly straightforward as “years of experience” can be executed in many different ways by an author and read many different ways by a reader. For example, it could be that the candidate has carefully converted their experiences to “fulltime equivalent” years (i.e. 24 months of experience doing a part time job for 20 hours per week is equivalent to 1 year FTE experience). Or, it could be that the candidate uses a skill in a limited way for a small amount of time once every month or two for a couple of years and then claims to have 2 years’ experience with that skill. Or it could be that the candidate uses the skill all day every day in advanced ways for six months and claims to have 0.5 year of experience with that skill. In this simple example, the most qualified candidate is actually the one who claims the least amount of experience in terms of # of years, and the one that claims the highest number of years actually has the least (and least-useful) experience with it.

Relative labels and numerical ratings are tricky as well, because even the best-intentioned candidate will fail miserably at evaluating themselves. The candidate may use lackluster labels because they understand they’re extremely junior. Or they may not have enough experience to understand how junior they are and make a critical error like using the term “experienced” or “expert” to describe themselves (very common in “big fish, small pond” cases like where a college student may have more experience than their classmates, but not understand how little experience they have compared to people at various points of fulltime careers in the industry). These labels are bad news and at best are simply wrong, but at worst invite hostility and distract the screeners or interviewers (i.e. if a screener reads a resume and a self-assessment seems incorrect, the screener may become prejudiced or may make the wrong decision based on the candidate’s mistaken wording; if an interviewer reads an overconfident self-assessment from a candidate, the interviewer will press the candidate quite hard to understand the true level of the candidate’s ability with that skill and some hostile interviewers may simply choose to pick a fight with the candidate which the candidate will always lose).

Remember, a reader does not simply look for content but also indicators of a candidate’s soft skills like prioritization, writing ability, etc. A candidate’s misunderstanding about what constitutes clarity and valued content can count against the candidate before a single word is said in an interview.

Premise 2: Filling Gaps — A skills list is a great way to describe things the candidate knows that haven’t been used in jobs or projects listed on the resume

Generally speaking, the most important parts of a resume are, in decreasing order of importance/priority:

1. Personal identification (name, email, phone)
2. Work experience
3. Projects
4. Education
5. Awards
6. Publications (assumes candidate is not applying for academia roles — if applying for academia roles, a CV should be used instead so this priority order is moot anyway)

If a skill, technology, or tool is not used in a resume-worthy job or project, it does not belong on a resume. Examples include things a candidate has heard about in classes, used only on homework assignments or class projects, read about in blogs, heard about at conferences, used in tutorials, etc. These experiences are great and can be described when relevant in cover letters and/or interview discussions, but they by their very nature do not belong on a resume.

Note also that this is something to consider when cutting off older roles — if you have a skill in the description of a job from a while ago that now needs to be removed because you have too many newer things to add, you should not create a skills list to distract the reader when you already decided the experience with those skills is so outdated or irrelevant that the jobs/projects weren’t worth including on the resume.

Premise 3: Because Technology Is Used — Companies use candidate-processing software to store and search resumes so it’s important to include key terms to make it more likely that a candidate will appear in the employer’s search results or with a higher “hit ratio” than other candidates because of the number of terms that match words used in a company’s job description

Yes, resumes are stored in databases and searched using software. However, that’s just a first step. The resume is then retrieved and read by a human who has to evaluate whether the candidate is worth calling for an interview, and the resume is the used by interviewers to inspire questions and make judgments about the candidate’s fitness for the role. If the resume is written for an audience that is an algorithm but doesn’t serve the candidate well when evaluated by a human, the resume has failed the candidate. The software will find the key terms when they’re listed in the descriptions of jobs and projects in a manner that properly conveys meaning and context to a human reader.

Premise 4: Search Optimization — The most important thing is stacking the deck in favor of visibility for the candidate; the company is responsible for deciding whether the candidate is qualified

The statement is based in truth. The company absolutely has the responsibility to evaluate candidates with the goal of hiring one that is the best fit for the role. Additionally, the candidate has the responsibility of marketing themselves as well as possible with the goal of being selected for a role where the candidate is a great fit.

However, if the candidate is using the “spray and pray” method and applying to any role that comes down the pipe because “it’s a job”, the candidate is not fulfilling their responsibility. If a candidate applies for a job without being qualified and simply packs in a bunch of key terms in order to get selected for the interview, the candidate is wasting everyone’s time.

The candidate in that scenario is wasting the company’s time to review their resume for initial screening (when the candidate shouldn’t have even applied). The candidate wastes the time of any interviewers involved when a properly written resume would’ve ruled out the candidate in earlier screening (or would’ve simply not applied at all). Additionally, the candidate has wasted their own time to create the resume and submit the application when that time could’ve been spent better by creating a properly written resume and applying to a job for which the candidate is actually qualified, as well as any time spent interviewing for the role(s) for which the candidate is unqualified.

Candidates do not get job offers simply by including key terms on resumes. Candidates still have to demonstrate through the interview process that they are actually qualified. Even if an unqualified candidate manages to get through the interviews and receives and offer for the role, the candidate still must perform as expected once working in that role — otherwise they let down their coworkers, manager, and employer, and will most likely be quickly fired (even if they aren’t fired, the negative effect on morale and productivity for both the candidate and all of the people around them is significant). Getting fired wastes a candidates time, which is important because now they have a gap in their work history that they will be asked to explain in future interviews.

Finally, reputation damage is hard to fix. If a candidate gets interviewed and tries to pretend like they’re qualified when they’re not, it first invites significant scrutiny from interviewers — if they think a candidate is lying or overstating themselves, they may rule out the candidate regardless of any other qualifications the candidate may have. In some cases, interviewers may note these occurrences and retain both notes and personal impressions of the candidate that will work against the candidate in related hiring decisions as well as professional interactions in the future. If an unqualified candidate gets hired and gives their boss/coworkers/customers the impression that they’re incompetent, that reputation will follow the person through their time at their current company as well as future professional and personal interactions with those people and people they know.

A paycheck is a very short term benefit/goal for an unqualified candidate, and the long-term negative costs/impacts/tradeoff are generally a net-negative. Candidates are best-served seeking roles that they’re qualified for, which starts with a properly written resume.

Note carefully — this does not preclude candidates from applying to roles where they have some gaps and room for growth/improvement. I’m a big believer in using each step in a career to grow upward and outward personally and professionally. As a general rule, employers also support these same ideas. What is not supported is a candidate who has insufficient foundation of experience/perspective necessary for their role.

Premise 5: Because Technology Is Broken — Some candidate-processing software/databases do not allow searching of key terms in job descriptions, but do search terms in skills lists

This is a myth. Software search algorithms don’t care where in a document key terms are located. It’s not like the software becomes blind to a word because it’s buried in the middle of a description for a job or project. As long as the word is used, the software will find it.

People occasionally will insist that they have heard of this behavior happening. Each time the claim is made, I invite them to demonstrate it to me firsthand or share with me documented firsthand evidence of it occurring. I have yet to receive either from anyone or witness it firsthand myself. This offer stands indefinitely ; if someone demonstrates this claim in a manner that refutes the discussion I’ve made for Premise 5 here, I will modify this narrative to cite the evidence presented and address the new information revealed with an updated recommendation.

Premise 6: Redundancy — I have used a skill in multiple jobs and/or projects; a skills list allows me to list each term only once, and it’s important to optimize content vs space used

Good thinking! In computer science, for example, we are taught that duplicate code can be abstracted for easier maintenance and improved performance. However, this concept does not apply in the same way for resume writing.

By mentioning relevant skills/technologies/tools within the description of each job or project, a candidate simultaneously demonstrates the context of the types of work done in each role/project with those skills, the recency of their experience, the total timeframe(s) of their experience with those skills, etc.

This can be applicable in many cases but especially when technologies/tools have changed over time. For example, someone with significant Javascript experience whose most recent JS experience ended in 2015 will have major gaps in their understanding of the current version of JS and best practices that have evolved in the past 3 years. While the example timeframe is still fairly “recent”, the massive sea-change that has occurred in that language’s structure and usage would render the candidate useless in many modern roles that would prefer instead candidates who are up to speed with all of the ES2015, ES2016, ES2017, and ES2018 advances. A candidate that does a cram session and practices tutorials for an interview will still have a major skills and perspective gap vs a candidate that has an ongoing track record with the technology on a daily basis in the intervening years.

Premise 7: Everyone Does It — Using a skills list must be a best practice since it’s included in resume templates/examples, commonly taught in resume-writing workshops, high school English classes, college communication classes, technical writing courses, etc

Justifying functional problems and negative outcomes on the basis that others do the same thing is a dangerous mindset for a professional. It illustrates a personal flaw, where a person will not seek to fix the problems because they see other people doing the wrong thing. This one isn’t merely about the “optics” — if a candidate finds themselves with this mindset, it’s in their interest to train themselves to think differently for the betterment of their long-term career and personal development.

Looks like you’re overthinking this. Why so serious?

As mentioned at the outset, the purpose of this narrative is an in-depth examination of skills lists and their value on resumes. You as the author of your own resume and captain of your own destiny are free to make whatever choices you want. If you still want to include a skills list, you’re free to do so — there’s no resume police that will appear next to your laptop to issue you a misdemeanor for premeditated waste of time or criminal waste of space :-)

But wait — you didn’t address my special circumstance(s)!

If you believe you have a unique reason for why skills lists are good that is not addressed above, please feel free to outline it in the comments or share it with me in a personal message. I’ll update this narrative going forward as needed to address any gaps.