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What Skills to Put on a Resume

To start with, what skills you need to put on your resume is a lot more important that you think. Yes, employers look for certain skill sets and you have to give it to them. But, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Here are the essential things you can do to find the skills to put on your resume.

Go find the skills mentioned in the job description and then paste those in your resume. This is a lot better compared to having generic skills. And how to discover untapped resources to get an edge in your application. If the job description mentions certain skills in need, then it’s always a good idea to put a couple of them in your resume. I don’t recommend you put them all. You may look like you just gave them a tailored resume exactly what they are looking for. You don’t want to look fake. Let’s assume you are a fresh graduate and you have completed about three months of internships, be it a contractual work, or an internship,it doesn’t matter.

This means you have spent about six hundred hours doing a particular work. So, here is my question. Is it even remotely possible to list down everything you have done in that organization, all the skills you developed in four bullet points in your resume? Impossible. Isn’t it? It’s impossible. You have done way more things and developed skill sets to squeeze in a little tiny box in your resume. Now here is the interesting part,just as how you cannot put everything you did for that organization or all the skills you developed on your resume,hiring managers also cannot list down everything you will be doing if you get the job. But,HR won’t necessarily know this. Most times,HR only knows about what is given to him or her – which is sometimes or most of the time very limited.

To get to my point, there are so many unwritten requirements when it comes to your skills, experience, tools, software, hardware, the list is very long on this.If you go ahead and copy the skills needed from the job post and put it in your resume, you will maybe meet the bare minimum but will create an opportunity loss. You will fail to impress the hiring manager and collect a lot more points. Let’s get more detailed and look at some examples.
If you are applying to a sales role, you are most likely going to use some sort of a CRM tool, it’s most likely going to be Sales Force, Zoho or bigger integrated systems like SAP and Oracle. If it’s a project management role you are applying to, you can almost be guaranteed to use MS projects or Primavera. If the role is very analytical, then you will definitely use MS Excel. Excel, is a tricky one though.

These are just some of the examples that I could think of. So, this is the best way to get an edge over other candidates. By mentioning those skills in your resume that are not in the job post. The best thing for you to do is when you are researching about the company, try to find out what tools they are using and then make sure you mention them in your resume. Let’s say you are applying for a role that you know requires Sales Force, maybe not openly written in job description but will be asked in the interview, if I were you, even if I have no experience in Sales Force I would still put it in my resume, but then I would go get a trial account, and go through all the tutorials before the interview date comes.

This applies to everything else. If they call you in for an interview, they won’t call you in for tomorrow. They will schedule you with at least a week in advance notice. That’s plenty of time to master most software and tools if you put in the effort. If you put in the work, find out about these tools in advance, then mention them in your resume, you will increase your chances significantly.
Mentioning these specific skills will help you the most with the Hiring Manager. Remember the decision maker is always the hiring manager. It’s never the HR. HR simply acts as a filtering mechanism so hiring managers won’t have to waste hundreds of hours finding qualified candidates. By mentioning these unwritten requirements, you are getting thumbs up from  the hiring manager.
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You might also want to read Best Resume Template
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