In today’s competitive job market, there’s more to getting hired than just matching the qualifications.

Whether it’s interpersonal qualities, specific job skills, or personality characteristics, employers look for a blend in the ideal candidate. When you’re immersed in the job search alongside hundreds or even thousands of other candidates, highlighting the right qualities can help you stand out from the crowd.

What Skills Do Employers Look For?

Highlighting your strongest and most marketable skills on a resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn profile can help create a powerful impression that gets you through the door. While each industry and job requires a different set of skills, certain core qualities are essential to prove yourself as the right fit.

We’ve shared five of the most sought-after skills that employers look for in candidates.

Leadership

One of the many soft skills that employers look for is leadership. Whether you’re managing a team or taking a head role in a collaborative project, leadership involves keeping others on task and accountable. When you demonstrate great leadership, you’re also accepting responsibility for outcomes, volunteering to take on assignments, and being prepared to take charge in challenging situations, and employers love to see that skill in potential employees.

To demonstrate leadership on a resume, you can emphasize skills like dedication, dependability, active listening, integrity, communication, delegation, responsibility, and decisiveness.

Problem-Solving

Problem-solving skills allow you to objectively assess a situation and determine how to move forward. It means seeking solutions despite challenges and setbacks in the workplace.

Employers look for candidates who can take action and brainstorm solutions to some of the problems the company faces. Skills to highlight include communication, decision making, research, creativity, critical thinking, and analytic thinking.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Regardless of the role, teamwork skills are critical. Even in positions that rely heavily on independent work, you’ll still be expected to connect with other roles, teams, and departments.

Cross-functional collaboration means being able to cooperate with colleagues who may each specialize in different areas. Despite having different areas of expertise, the team members need to be able to work toward a common goal and implement new strategies to improve operations.

To show your collaborative skills, you can highlight communication, openness, the ability to give and receive feedback, flexibility, empathy, and responsibility.

Self-Management

In fast-paced work environments, self-management is crucial. Employers want to know that their staff can manage their own time effectively and stay on track, without anyone looking over their shoulder.

Self-management skills allow you to manage your own time, keep track of your progress, and maximize your productivity. In addition to contributing to the company’s growth, you should focus on your own professional growth day by day.

There are some skills to feature on your resume include time management, organization, motivation, goal setting, multitasking, strategic thinking, and prioritization, that will show great self-management.

Initiative

Employers look for candidates who will take initiative in the workplace instead of waiting for their boss to direct them. This means being proactive about opportunities and finding new ways to move the company toward its goals.

Demonstrating this kind of inner drive can prove that you’ll add a lot of value to the company. Skills to highlight include initiative, self-motivation, organization, persistence, and diligence.

What Employers Want To See From You

If you ask recruiters what they look for in an applicant, you’ll hear a lot of similar answers: efficiency, dedication, honesty, leadership, and motivation. These qualities can prove that you’re the right fit, but there’s more to the ideal candidate than technical or soft skills. There are certain traits employers look for that might not be as visible.

These elements of the hiring process are often overlooked, but they can help you stand out among equally qualified or even more experienced candidates.

Thinking and Problem-Solving on the Job

It’s not just about the skills you possess on your resume. It’s also about how you’re going to use those skills and apply them to your work.

Employers value critical reasoning, problem-solving, and solution-oriented thinking because these elements are key to almost any role. You want to demonstrate your ability to assess a situation, analyze the information, recognize what needs to be done, and take action to implement efficient and creative solutions.

Positioning yourself as a creative, practical, and innovative thinker takes more than just the right keywords on your resume. You need to prove that you have faced challenges in the past and come up with a successful solution. Highlight these experiences on your resume and cover letter, and have a few examples prepared for your interview.

Cultural Fit vs. Skills-Based Fit: What’s the Difference?

In the world of recruiting, hiring managers debate between two qualities: cultural fit and skills-based fit.

A cultural fit refers to your ability to fit seamlessly with your team members. You want to have the right cultural alignment, get along well with coworkers, collaborate with different teams, and inspire others in the workplace.

While culture can mean a lot in a workplace environment, skills are just as important. If you bring the right skills, you can hit the ground running on new tasks and projects. You might not require as big of an up-front investment of time and resources.

Finding the Right Balance

While the cultural vs. skills-based fit continues to be hotly debated, you don’t need to choose between the two. You can strike a balance between fitting into workplace culture and bringing the right skills to the role.

While the required skill set might be laid out in the job description, it’s harder to seek out a good cultural fit. Before applying, take a moment to research the kind of work environment at the company you’re applying to. Use resources like Glassdoor, Fishbowl, and other career sites to get a sense of what the company might be like behind closed doors.

How Capstone Resumes Can Help

The best skills and qualities to put on a resume will depend on the industry, job type, and career level. Before you apply for a job, take a moment to assess the skills that the employer might consider the most valuable.

Anticipating what an employer might look for can allow you to fine-tune your resume to highlight the personal strengths that align with the company’s goals. Identifying these connections between the company’s needs and your strengths will help you make a solid impression.

If you’re looking to stand out with your resume, contact us to schedule a personal resume consultation. Our experts will work with you to highlight your strengths and showcase the value you can bring to the table.

Above anything else, the resume is a marketing document. It is used to sell yourself and show why you are the best choice over other candidates that applied for a position. You must always put your best foot forward and emphasize your strengths in a way that shows why you are the ideal person for the position.

No Degree Doesn’t Equal No Job

Many professionals feel that not having a degree automatically disqualifies them from certain jobs. As time goes by, even those with college degrees are judged based on the achievements within their experience. As the degree gets older, it is weighed less. It becomes viewed as less valuable, and the focus shifts to what you did in your last job to improve operations, revenue or overall performance.

Even if you don’t have a degree, there are still ways to market yourself. The fact that you have significant achievements can outweigh the no degree factor. Successful examples of this are Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Both men dropped out of Harvard to pursue their own ventures – ventures that have been wildly successful.

Experience Sells

Focus on the PARs. PARs are Problem-Action-Result statements that show what actions were taken on the job and how they produced positive results. The achievements and PARs that came from your experience are your strengths. Be sure to highlight them to show how you can bring those experiences and skills with you to your next job. Again, experience sells better than anything else on the resume.

You can also use PARs to discuss problems you were able to solve and operations you improved. Highlight the processes or programs you put in place to help you achieve great results.

Highlight Strengths

Be sure to show your past experience and how well you performed in previous roles. This is key to selling yourself to a hiring manager, as how you performed in previous roles is the best indicator of how you will perform in a future role.

If you don’t have a college degree or are struggling to write an effective resume, Capstone Resume Services can help! A resume writing service based in California, we work one-on-one with clients to help craft a professional resume that will help them stand out from the crowd.

Whether you need an entry level resume, federal resume, executive resume, or technical resume, we can write a resume that will represent who you are and the experience you will bring to the position. And we don’t just write resumes! We can also provide you with a professional LinkedIn profile or a cover letter that is the perfect introduction to your resume.

Contact Capstone Resume Services to request a consultation today!

The numbers are pretty sobering. In the spring of 2015 some 2.8 million students graduated from college with either bachelor’s or advanced degrees. That’s a lot of young and inexperienced workers entering the workforce.

The job market since the great recession has not been kind to recent college graduates. Even today as the economy continues to slowly improve, 18-29-year-olds make up 40 percent of the nation’s unemployed. The unemployment rate among the same age group hovers around 13 percent, while the national average sits around 5.2 percent.

Getting started in a career can be difficult, especially with little to no experience.

That’s why it’s never been as important for recent graduates to create entry-level resumes and LinkedIn profiles that stand out, even though their level of experience may not be on par with competing job-seekers. Even with little to no work history, you can relate your past experiences and achievements, whether through community affiliations or extracurricular activities, beyond paid jobs to excellent talking points on your resume.

Here’s how:

Highlight all your accomplishments and volunteer experience Maybe you didn’t land the killer internship last summer. So what did you do instead? Unless you spent the entire summer on the couch, you likely have some sort of experience to highlight — even volunteering.

Employers love hiring people who love to volunteer, and finding volunteer opportunities is never difficult. Nonprofit agencies are always looking for free labor and offer the skills you’ll need to enter the workforce There are countless ways to leverage that experience on your entry-level resume, and at Capstone Resume Services we can help you do just that.

Don’t count out minimum wage jobs as fodder for your first resume, either. Work in the stockroom at the local big box over the holidays? Turn that job title into “inventory control” and make sure to highlight any and all accomplishments.

Keep it short and simple Hiring managers and recruiters are bombarded with dozens of entry-level resumes every day, leaving them little time to study pages and pages of fluff designed to fill in gaps in experience. Yes, it’s important to detail all relevant work experience, volunteer service and achievements, but adding words or sentences just to fill out an entire page will ensure your resume won’t receive the attention it deserves. If you’re trying to avoid the half-page look, consider bringing in the margins a little bit, bumping up the font size of your name at the top and spacing out your contact info on separate lines.

Line up your references We all have people in our lives that can vouch for our work-ethic, intelligence and ability. Seek those people out and get them to agree to advocate on your behalf. While you may not want to list your references directly on your resume, ask them to write you a letter of recommendation that you can provide at a moment’s notice or that you can upload as separate files in online job listings. While you may not have a lot of relevant experience, lining up quality references who can speak well of you could make all the difference.

Capstone Resume Services is expert in crafting the ideal entry-level resume. Let us help you standout in a crowded field. Contact us today to request a consultation.