Highlighting your skills through a resume is not always an intuitive exercise. Knowing how to “sell” yourself without appearing arrogant, creating meaning in different experiences or even bringing out your personality are all the challenges of this first stage of recruitment: the resume.

In recent years, soft skills have been the differentiating element in allowing companies to build teams with complementary personalities. These human skills are all the more important for jobs that are directly in contact with customers and the market, such as commercial functions.

In this article, we give you all the keys to help you do well in an increasingly tense job market.

Hard skills and soft skills, key concepts

Behind these anglicisms, which have become commonplace in recruitment jargon, hide two important key concepts in an application. However, the difference between these terms is not always well known and understood by everyone. To see more clearly, here is a reminder.

Hard skills : this corresponds to the technical and professional skills acquired during your training courses or your various experiences. Often measurable and attested by a diploma or certificate, these skills represent the ability to carry out your tasks and missions. Hard skills demonstrate your level of mastery of the technicality of a job and its sector, they evoke your know-how.

Soft skills : this term that has grown in importance in recent years refers to your behavioral skills. These skills allow the recruiter to see who you are, how you think, or even your ability to interact with your environment. While there are now many tests that make it possible to understand the profile of candidates, such as the MBTI for example, this is still a rather subjective point in recruitment.

Valuing your technical skills

Even if recruitment trends are aimed at valuing personality and individuals, job skills are still constitutive elements of recruitment. Keep in mind that a recruiter will have to process a large volume of applications for the same position with potentially the same technical skills, so that yours catch their attention.

To help you stand out from the crowd, here are some tips to promote your know-how.

Analyze your background

Before starting headlong into creating your resume, it is important to take the time to reflect on your career path. By asking yourself these few questions, you will be able to identify the skills you want to highlight.

What tasks can I do independently?

On which missions am I the most efficient?

How do I break down my various missions?

By completing this exercise, you will be able to draw up a list of potential skills to highlight.

Understanding business needs

This step is often the step that candidates lack: it is important to understand what the company needs. First, take the time to read the job description and the missions that compose it. Then, it is necessary to question the skills applicable to the job offer and highlight those in which a company would be able to invest.

Let's take the example of a salesperson whose mission is prospecting by email. Mastering prospecting is an important argument, but skills in exploiting data that make it possible to optimize the performance of emailing campaigns become the differentiating element.

This step should allow you to highlight 3 to 4 skills that create value for your future business.

Valuing the relevance of your skills

Now that you have a clear idea of what makes you unique on the market, it is essential to make them appear on the resume. The best technique is still to create a link between the position, your skills and the results obtained. It is this notion of correlation, of logic, that will demonstrate the relevance of your skills for the desired position.

Let's continue with our example: this salesperson will have to make the link between the expected competence, prospecting, his differentiating competence, the exploitation of data and the results obtained. Here is a proposal to put in your resume: 8% increase in the conversion rate of email prospecting campaigns thanks to the strategic exploitation of data.

Know-how at the service of know-how

Faced with the rapid evolution of jobs and skills, behavioral skills have become essential for recruiters. However, it is important to keep in mind that your soft skills must be put at the service of your know-how.

Do not give in to the temptation to highlight trendy skills such as resilience, kindness or agility, there is no ideal personality. The real added value lies in the alignment that is created between your soft skills, your hard skills and the missions offered.

To identify the qualities to highlight based on the job description, you can think about the behavioral skills to have for each of the missions.

For example, prospecting is an area that requires tenacity and perseverance to deal with numerous rejections and objections.

Building on your experiences

Unlike technical skills, soft skills are based on all of your professional or non-professional experiences. To promote your interpersonal skills, it is also relevant to reflect on the skills developed through your interests and your personal activities.

Sport, for example, is an excellent driver of interesting values in business such as rigor, perseverance or teamwork in team sports. Volunteering, art, music, travel, it is possible to find differentiating qualities in each of your moments of life. Then, you have to put them in parallel with your technical skills to create meaning.

If you only need to keep one piece of advice in mind when writing your resume, think about the correlation and alignment between your various skills. This will reinforce the veracity of your words and allow the recruiter to understand who you are as soon as they read your resume. This work will also prepare you for interviews and you will be able to explain your various points without any hesitation.