Everyone knows that the purpose of a job application is to highlight your skills, showcase your professional assets, land an interview, and (if all goes well) get the job.
But if you’re like many people,having to rely on work experience to communicate value as a candidate could put you at a serious disadvantage. This scenario is especially the case for recent graduates, career changers, and anyone re-entering the workforce.
That’s why knowing how to convincingly demonstrate your hard and soft skills in your job application is so valuable.
Unfortunately, making your skills stand out on a job application isn’t always easy. After all, most resumes are designed to hone in on your work experience. To help you put your best foot forward, here are three expert tips on how highlight your skills in a job application.
1. Use the Best Resume Format
Most standard resume formats highlight professional experience by putting your career progression front-and-center in chronological order. While this structure is ideal for candidates with a consistent work history in a single industry, it also has some drawbacks.
Most notably, chronological resumes typically feature a short or non-existent resume objective. This reduces the amount of context you’re able to provide about your professional strengths. Additionally, this format also obscures your key attributes byshoving the skills section either to the margin or toward the bottom of the page.
Your resume is the first thing a hiring manager will look at in your complete job application. If you want to heavily feature your skillset, this type of resume design is doing you a disservice.
Instead, try using the skills-centric functional resume format. This helps to put your skills first, and highlights your other marketable accomplishments and achievements.
If you have non-traditional work experience — or lack work experience entirely — using a functional resume is a great way to highlight your broader qualifications.
This format provides space to write out a more robust resume objective, and includes a more substantial skills section. The structure is built in a way that emphasizes your relevant competencies, rather than just the job titles you’ve held as an employee.
The functional resume is also ideal if you’re looking to rejoin the workforce. This is becauseit highlights your core strengths and takes the focus away from your employment history by avoiding a traditional chronological overview. So, it’s a great tool if you want to highlight your skills in a job application.
2. Highlight Your Skills by Leveraging Keywords
Larger companies receive thousands of job applicants for each position they list online. With so many applications coming their way, most employers use applicant tracking system (ATS) software to weed out unqualified candidates and simplify the hiring process.
These systems work by combing through resumes and cover letters for specific skill-related keywords to determine if candidates are qualified to move to the next round.
To make it through the filter, highlight your skills by including relevant keywords from the job posting in your resume and cover letter. This has the added benefit of making you appear as an ideal match for the position when the hiring manager eventually takes a look at your resume.
Employers incorporate important keywords into job listings to describe their idea of the perfect candidate. Scan through the listing and see if certain qualifications or skills are mentioned. Then, work these words into your resume and cover letter.
Additionally, make sure you use specific language when describing your skills. Applicant tracking systems aren’t capable of much subtlety, so if you’re couching your skills in more complex language, your application is more likely to be overlooked. Not only that, but using flowery language can end up wasting significant space on your resume.
3. Quantify Your Achievements
If the only instance on your resume of your skills looks like this:
-Detail oriented
-Excellent communicator
-HTML/CSS
-JavaScript
Then you’re not highlighting your skills as much as possible.
Including skill keywords is an important part of writing a great resume; but it’s not enough. Employers don’t just want to read about your abilities, they want to see that you’re actually capable of getting the job done, and that your expertise can help achieve hard results.
To do this, provide concrete instances of how you put your skills to work. Use quantified, action-oriented examples in the body of your resume and cover letter to show how your abilities helped you achieve something.
Don’t just state your competencies — back them up with percentages, dollar amounts, or time saved performing a task. Here’s an example that lacks quantification:
“Designed and executed a revamped iOS app for the company’s flagship product.”
It doesn’t sound terrible, but it’s a bit vague. You want to highlight your skills in each point, and use a number to show how your abilities made a quantifiable impact:
“Leveraged my knowledge of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML to design and execute a revamped iOS app for the company’s flagship product, increasing sales by 14% annually.”
This improved bullet point not only includes the skill keywords that an employer wants, but it also recontextualizes the candidate’s work experience to be results-oriented.
Highlight Your Skills
Whether you’re someone with non-traditional work experience, gaps in your work history, or just a strong set of expertise, knowing how to highlight your skills on your job application is critical. These expert tips can help you do just that, and start nailing down interviews.
