Never use these soft skills on your resume
Writing a winning resume isn’t always easy. The first step you should take is to make a strategy about what you should include in your resume and how to write it by using appropriate words. This sounds simple but candidates make mistakes here most of the time. When candidates write their resumes, they don’t pay enough attention to strategy and word selection. The wrong word choice can wreck your resume.
Soft skills are very important part of our resume and selection of soft skills for our resume play vital role in landing a job. Sometime, employers even list some of the “soft skills” in their job ads. If we use those soft skills on our resume, employers also do look for these skills in the candidates while evaluating them for the job profile. And you can show that only by the results or achievements rather than simply mentioning them in the resume.
Most of the candidates still mention common soft skills in the resume and send them along with their application to the employers in hopes that it will impress them. Employers are tired of reading those common soft skills. A lot of job seekers feel they need to communicate their soft-skills to the employer to make them appear unique. There is nothing further from the truth.
If you want to ensure that your resume is shortlisted, here are some words and phrases to avoid then make sure that you never use them in your resume.
- Excellent communication skills
- Goal-driven
- Strong work ethic
- Multi-tasker
- Personable presenter
- Goal-oriented
- Best of breed
- Go-getter
- Think outside of the box
- Synergy
- Go-to person
- Thought leadership
- Value add
- Team player
- Results-driven
- Bottom-line
- Hard worker
- Strategic thinker
- Self-motivated
- Dynamic
- Detail-oriented
Don’t bore your employer with these overused and tired phrases. After all, no one writes that he/she takes long lunches, is lazy, can’t work under pressure, is not a team player, argues a lot with peers and all. Hence, it is much more effective to write descriptions that are action-based and demonstrate these abilities rather than just laying claim to them; show, don’t tell.
