Job Search – Resume / You need to include soft skills

Incorporating soft skills articulately means describing how you helped tame heated meetings and how your ability to communicate orally or in writing helped forge alliances, influence solidarity and/or move projects so they steamed ahead and achieved bottom-line goals.

In fact, your soft skills probably were most heavily relied upon when you first started your job. For each new position, you’ve either taken over after someone voluntarily left or was fired and therefore replaced an employee who was succeeding or who had failed. Perhaps even, you were recruited to pave the way for a new position. Whatever the case, you faced challenges to repair brokenness, expand on success, open new marketplace roadways – and so on.

Soft Skills Drive Hard Results

The common thread is that, unless you are a robot, you didn’t just bulldoze your way in and mechanically drive results. Instead, you began by applying softer skills in order to achieve more concrete outcomes. Those softer skills encompassed:

• Analysis—assessing current situations
• Collaboration—working to understand teammates’ or employees’ frustrations, areas of satisfaction and fears so you could more meaningfully contribute
• Composure—proving that you are composed, despite an unfamiliar, new environment often wrought with jealous, distrusting employees who may see you as a threat
• Listening—showing, through responsive action that you heard and worked to understand what was requested; and the list goes on

Bottom line: Peppering your resume with metrics and outcomes is great, but not at the sacrifice of the softer skills and initiatives that deftly pull the threads together to achieve those hard-hitting outcomes. It’s as much about the back-story, replete with the how and why you performed the way you did and the intricate relationship weaving, influencing, analyzing, listening, innovating, change driving, negotiating and global communications, as it is about the result.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Why You Need To Include Soft Skills On Your Resume | Glassdoor Blog.

via  The hard truth about soft skills | Dorothy Dalton.

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