What skills to put on a resume, and how to show them

Hard skills, soft skills and the Skills section

Prospects, the UK graduate careers service, defines hard skills as specific, teachable abilities or knowledge that are often measurable and job-specific: a programming language, a lab technique, bookkeeping. Soft skills are personal attributes that affect how you work with others and approach your work: communication, reliability, problem solving. Both belong on a resume, but in different places.

What Harvard's template puts in a Skills section

Harvard College's career office, the Mignone Center for Career Success, ends its bullet-point resume template with an optional Skills & Interests section of four lines: Technical (software and programming languages, with your level), Language (foreign languages, with your level), Laboratory (research techniques or tools, if any) and Interests. Its sample resume writes one line as 'Technical: Stata, SQL, R (intermediate), SPSS (beginner).' Harvard's engineering school adds that the skills section matters, and that showing how you used those skills matters too.

What to do in the first minute

Open the job posting next to your resume. Copy every tool, method, certification and language it names into a list, spelled the way the posting spells them. Then tick each one you can point to in a bullet of your experience: those are the skills to list first. To check the file itself, use the free checker at the top of this page. It needs no account, and among other things it flags skill levels that may be drawn as bars and a skill listed as basic that your own experience contradicts.

How to choose skills from the job posting

1. Read the duties and requirements, not only the job title. Harvard's career office tells students to tailor the resume to the position, using skills and experiences from the job description.
2. Write down every hard skill the posting names, exactly as written: 'Microsoft Excel', 'SQL', 'stakeholder reporting'.
3. Keep only what you can back. Prospects warns not to exaggerate your abilities, because you will need to back up your claims at interview.
4. Order them the way the posting does: required skills first, nice-to-haves after.
5. Add skills the role clearly needs that the posting forgot, if your work used them.
6. Drop skills every applicant has, such as email or web browsing, unless the posting asks for them.

Resume keywords for an ATS

Keywords are the words a recruiter or an applicant tracking system (ATS) searches for, mostly the hard skills and qualifications in the posting. MIT's career office notes that employers may use keyword scanning, so the relevant words should appear in your resume. Harvard's career office recommends basic formatting, explicitly listing your skills, and using keywords from the job description in context. In context is the part people skip: the keyword inside a line about what you did, not only in a list.

Soft skills: show them through results

Harvard's career office wrote in September 2026 that soft skills are becoming more important and that a resume should highlight them. Highlighting works through evidence. Harvard's own sample resume shows communication with 'Presented findings to senior managers' and organisation with a business conference coordinated for 50 professionals and 500 students. Phrases such as 'team player' or 'excellent communication skills' show nothing; CitedCV's checker flags them in summary and experience lines.

Show each skill in an experience bullet

MIT's career office puts it plainly: include how you performed tasks, not just what you did; if you wrote software, say what language you used. Prospects asks for specific examples of when you put a skill into practice. The bullets below are illustrations; use your own facts and your own numbers, or none.

Why a list alone counts for less

Employer scoring compares your resume with the job's own criteria. Workday's HiredScore documentation describes a grade based on how well a resume matches the skills and qualifications in the job description; Greenhouse's Talent Matching scores candidates against weighted criteria a recruiter sets. Neither page says how a bare list is weighed against a bullet. CitedCV's job match is explicit about its own arithmetic: a requirement counts in full when a line of your CV shows it, quoted back, and only 0.3 of that when the keyword appears with no line that shows it. It costs 1 credit and opens once you buy any credit pack.

Write skill levels in words, not bars

Harvard's template asks for your level next to each technical skill and language, and its sample writes levels as words: R (intermediate), SPSS (beginner), fluent French, conversational Spanish. For languages, Europass uses the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), with six reference levels assessed for listening, reading, spoken interaction, spoken production and writing.

• Tools and methods: basic, intermediate or advanced, or better, what you built with it.
• Languages: native, fluent, conversational or basic, or a CEFR level such as B2 or C1.
• A test or certificate: its name, score and year, such as 'IELTS 7.5 (2025)'.
• No stars, dots, bars or percentages: '80% Excel' says nothing a reader can check.

Why bars and charts fail

A skill bar is a drawing. Greenhouse lists graphics among the causes of an unsuccessful resume parse, Workday recommends resumes without images or image-based styles, and Prospects says to avoid images, logos or graphics because an ATS cannot read them. Even when the skill name survives, the level does not: the parser gets 'Python' and nothing after it. CitedCV's checker flags a PDF page that draws many filled shapes while its skills carry no level in words.

When a level contradicts your experience

A level written too low is its own problem. 'Python (basic)' in the list, next to a bullet about building an API with FastAPI, tells a technical reader that one of the two is wrong. CitedCV's checker looks for exactly this: a language listed as basic or beginner while your experience names a framework built on it, such as FastAPI or Django for Python, React for JavaScript, Spring for Java or Laravel for PHP. Raise the level to match the work, or narrow the bullet.

What an ATS does with your skills: the vendor documentation

From each vendor's own pages, read on 5 October 2026 and listed under Sources. Each employer configures its own system, so this is what the software can do, not what every employer switches on.

Skills in Turkish and other languages

Textkernel lists Turkish among its CV parsing languages. Its skills taxonomy covers Turkish at its basic tier: common skills have a translation, but fewer synonyms are recorded than for English, German or French. For a Turkish CV that suggests the plain, common name of a skill, often the tool's own name such as Excel or SQL, rather than a description of it.

How CitedCV's checker reads a Skills section

• It files lines under Skills when the heading is one it knows: Skills, Technical Skills, Core Skills, Competencies or Skills & Interests, and in Turkish Beceriler, Yetkinlikler or Yetenekler. A one-item-a-line list stays in the section until the next heading.
• It flags a basic level that your experience contradicts, and levels that may be drawn as bars.
• It does not read a job posting, so it cannot say which skills are missing. The job match does that after any credit pack, for 1 credit.
• The checker adds nothing to your CV, and the CitedCV builder writes only from the facts you give it, asking when something is missing.

Who this page is not for

• You are writing an academic CV, where publications, grants and teaching carry more weight than a skills list; Harvard's career office publishes a separate CV guide for graduate students.
• You want the skills of a whole occupation rather than one posting. O*NET and ESCO, below, are built for that.
• You want a tool to tell you the score an employer will see. No outside tool can: employer scores use the employer's own criteria.

Other ways to find the right skills, and whom each fits

O*NET, ESCO, Europass and Jobscan are described from their own pages, read on 5 October 2026.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Harvard College Mignone Center for Career Success, Create a strong resumecareerservices.fas.harvard.edu/resources/create-a-strong-resume/
2. Harvard College Mignone Center for Career Success, Bullet point resume templatecareerservices.fas.harvard.edu/resources/bullet-point-resume-template/
3. Harvard College Mignone Center for Career Success, Resume sample (PDF)cdn-careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/161/2026/07/resume-sample.pdf
4. Harvard College Mignone Center for Career Success, AI for resumes and cover letterscareerservices.fas.harvard.edu/ai-resumes-and-cover-letters/
5. Harvard Mignone Center blog, Resumes for industry: grad student edition (2026)careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2026/09/15/resumes-for-industry-grad-student-edition-2026/
6. Harvard SEAS Office of Student Career Development, Resumes and portfoliosseas.harvard.edu/office-student-career-development/resources-undergraduate-students/resumes-portfolios
7. MIT Career Advising and Professional Development, Resumescapd.mit.edu/resources/resumes/
8. Prospects, What skills do employers want?www.prospects.ac.uk/careers-advice/applying-for-jobs/what-skills-do-employers-want/
9. Prospects, How to write a CVwww.prospects.ac.uk/careers-advice/cvs-and-cover-letters/how-to-write-a-cv
10. Workday documentation, Concept: Resume parsingdoc.workday.com/admin-guide/en-us/human-capital-management/recruiting/candidates/set-up-prospects-and-candidates/hdc1552497830785.html
11. Workday HiredScore documentation, Reference: Candidate gradesdoc.workday.com/hiredscore/en-us/workday-hiredscore/recruiter-productivity-/reference--candidate-grades.html
12. Greenhouse Support, Talent Matchingsupport.greenhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/41396009937307-Talent-Matching
13. Greenhouse Support, Unsuccessful resume parsesupport.greenhouse.io/hc/en-us/articles/200989175-Unsuccessful-resume-parse
14. Textkernel Skills Intelligence, Overview and language supportdeveloper.textkernel.com/SkillsIntelligence/master/skills/v2/
15. Textkernel Tx Platform, Release notes archivedeveloper.textkernel.com/tx-platform/v10/release-notes-archive/
16. Europass, Frequently asked questionseuropass.europa.eu/en/faq
17. O*NET OnLine, US Department of Laborwww.onetonline.org/
18. European Commission, What is ESCOesco.ec.europa.eu/en/about-esco/what-esco
19. Jobscan, Resume scannerwww.jobscan.co/