Source: www.forbes.com

When it comes to deciding what to include and what to omit from your resume, skills are a non-negotiable.

Especially if you are applying for a promotion, making a career pivot, or transitioning into a different industry, skills are what make your resume count and hold weight in the eyes of employers, even more than merely listing out your education and experience.

“Over 40% of companies on LinkedIn globally explicitly rely on skills to search and identify job candidates on LinkedIn (up 20% year-over-year),” says Rohan Rajiv, LinkedIn’s product lead on jobseeker, employer brand, and skills for LinkedIn Talent Solutions, speaking of the skills research tools that recruiters on LinkedIn use.

According to Rajiv, “showcasing your skills can give you a leg up in your job search.” And this applies, even if you’re entering the workforce for the first time, or re-entering after a lengthy hiatus.

You can have all the experience in the world and yet lose out on valuable career opportunities simply because you took the skills you gained through those experiences for granted, failed to mention them, and therefore no one knew that you possessed them at all.

What Skills Do You Need To Include On Your Resume?

So what skills exactly should you be including on your resume (and LinkedIn profile)?

First, let’s answer a preliminary question: What are the different types of skills that one should put on their resume?

Skills can be broadly divided into two core categories: soft skills, also more recently coined as power skills; and hard skills, also known as technical skills.

We can separate these two groups further, by classifying skills according to groups such as job-specific skills and competencies, interpersonal skills, high-income skills, and transferable skills. (Some of these entities will overlap.) Today, let’s dig into interpersonal skills and why they are necessary in your resume.

Why Interpersonal Skills Should Be Included In Your Resume

Interpersonal skills, a subset of soft skills, is a set of strengths that are essential if you are to work and collaborate well with people. The thing about interpersonal skills is that, regardless of what job you’re after, no matter how technical, they matter. This is because there is a 99% chance that you will be engaging with people at some point in your job—even if it an autonomous back-office role.

Whether engaging with your co-workers, building partnerships, closing a sale, voicing your suggestions in a meeting, or liaising with a stakeholder via email, interpersonal skills are the skeleton of authentic, trusting, and lasting work relationships. They enable all the gears of communication at work to run smoothly, reducing delays and misunderstandings.

Smart hiring managers know that assessing one’s interpersonal skills through analyzing a candidate’s resume, LinkedIn profile, interview answers, and overall presence and engagement throughout the entire recruitment process, can provide solid indications of whether a candidate would make a good culture fit for the company.

This is even more the case when applying for a remote job, as you are forced to use your interpersonal skills even more—online—and if you haven’t developed them, it will show.

10 Interpersonal Skills To Include In Your Resume In 2024

Here are a few of the most essential interpersonal skills you need to include and list examples of, throughout your resume, LinkedIn profile, and job application. This data has been compiled from a range of sources, including recent reports, surveys, and data from LinkedIn’s research team, the World Economic Forum, and Coursera.

And of course, remember to only include these interpersonal skills throughout your resume if you feel that they truly reflect you, and are relevant (which in most cases, they are):

1. Communication skills
2. Empathy
3. Emotional intelligence
4. Leadership skills
5. Conflict resolution
6. Problem-solving
7. Active listening
8. Negotiation
9. Networking skills
10. Teamwork

Don’t forget, when listing these interpersonal skills in your resume, or when answering a culture-focused interview question, provide some context to demonstrate how you applied them in prior roles. This real-world experience that showcases these skills as being your strengths is one of your greatest assets when applying for a role—and especially on LinkedIn.