Skills to Put on a Resume (and Where to Put Them)

You’re staring at a blank skills section wondering whether to list “Excel” or “advanced Excel,” whether “communication” counts as a real skill or just filler, and how many entries is too many. It feels like a small section, but it’s often the first thing an applicant tracking system scans and one of the first things a hiring manager’s eye lands on, which makes getting it right worth more effort than it usually gets.

The right skills to put on a resume come from two places: the specific requirements in the job posting, and the skills you can actually prove elsewhere on the resume. Anything you can’t back up with a bullet point or a real example is a liability, not a strength, because an interviewer can and will ask you about it.

Start with the posting, not a generic list

Open the job posting in one tab and your resume draft in the other. Go through the posting and underline every skill, tool, and qualification mentioned, including ones buried in the “responsibilities” section rather than the “requirements” list. This is your primary source, because it tells you exactly what this employer’s screening software is likely searching for and exactly what the hiring manager cares about enough to write down.

Sort what you find into three buckets:

1. Skills you have and can prove with a specific example or result
2. Skills you have but haven’t used recently or extensively
3. Skills you don’t have at all

Bucket one goes on your resume without hesitation. Bucket two can go on with honest framing, either in your skills section with the truth held ready for an interview question, or left off if the gap is significant. Bucket three should not appear on your resume at all, no matter how much you want to satisfy a keyword scan; claiming a skill you don’t have gets discovered fast in an interview or, worse, on the job.

Hard skills vs soft skills on a resume

Hard skills are specific and checkable: a software platform, a programming language, a certification, a methodology like Agile or Six Sigma. Soft skills are things like leadership, communication, or adaptability, and they’re harder to verify from a list alone, which is exactly why most soft skills belong in your bullet points rather than your skills section.

Type	Examples	Where it belongs
Hard skills	Salesforce, SQL, financial modeling, Adobe Creative Suite	Dedicated skills section, scannable list
Soft skills	Stakeholder management, conflict resolution, mentoring	Proven inside bullet points, listed sparingly if at all
Hybrid skills	Data-driven decision making, cross-functional project leadership	Named briefly in skills, proven in a bullet

If you do include a soft skill in your dedicated section, make sure it’s specific rather than generic. “Cross-functional stakeholder management” tells a hiring manager something. “Team player” tells them nothing they didn’t already assume.

How to prove a skill instead of just listing it

Listing “project management” on its own asks the reader to take your word for it. Proving it in a bullet does the work for them.

Weak: Skills: Project management, communication, Excel

Stronger, inside a bullet:

“Managed a cross-functional rollout across three departments, using Excel-based tracking to keep 40 stakeholders aligned on a compressed six-week timeline, delivered on schedule.”

That single bullet proves project management, stakeholder communication, and Excel all at once, with a concrete result attached. Your dedicated skills section still lists “Project management” and “Excel” for scanning purposes, but now there’s evidence backing the claim rather than just the claim itself.

Do this for every skill that matters most for the role. If you can’t write a bullet proving a skill anywhere on your resume, that’s a signal the skill either doesn’t belong on your resume, or belongs in your interview prep as something you can speak to even without a bullet.

Formatting the skills section for applicant tracking systems

Applicant tracking software scans for exact or close matches to the terms in the posting, so formatting choices genuinely affect whether you get seen.

• Use the exact term from the posting when reasonable. If they wrote “Google Analytics,” write that rather than just “analytics tools.”
• Avoid graphics, skill bars, or icons to represent proficiency. Most systems can’t parse them, and they add nothing a human reader needs either.
• Group related skills under short subheadings if your list runs long: Technical Skills, Tools, Certifications. This helps a human scanner as much as it helps software.
• List eight to fifteen entries. Fewer looks thin next to a detailed posting; more starts to read as a keyword dump.
• Spell out acronyms once if the role might be screened by both a system and a person unfamiliar with your specific jargon: “Search Engine Optimization (SEO).”

Where to put the skills section

For most job seekers, place the skills section after your summary and before your work experience. It’s one of the first things scanned, and putting it early means both software and a skimming human reviewer see it before they decide whether to keep reading.

Senior roles are an exception. If your experience section is clearly your strongest asset, and your seniority itself signals competence, it’s reasonable to move skills after experience so the reader hits your track record first.

A quick example: building the section from scratch

Say the posting is for a marketing coordinator role and lists: HubSpot, campaign reporting, cross-functional collaboration, content calendar management, and basic HTML.

A resume with no marketing platform experience but strong organizational skills might list:

Skills: Content calendar management, campaign reporting (Google Analytics, Excel), project coordination across design and sales teams, basic HTML, Asana, Canva

Note what’s missing: HubSpot isn’t listed, because the candidate hasn’t used it. Instead, related, honest tools are listed, and the resume’s bullets should show a track record of picking up new platforms quickly, so the gap reads as small rather than disqualifying.

Once your skills section is solid, the rest of the resume needs to carry its weight too. Our guide on how to write a resume that gets noticed covers structure and framing beyond this one section, and if you’re building a resume with limited work history, how to write a resume with no experience has specific guidance on which skills carry the most weight when your job history is thin.

If you want a second set of eyes checking that your skills section actually matches what this role’s hiring manager is scanning for, resume and LinkedIn coaching reviews it line by line against the real posting. Take the two-minute quiz to get matched with a coach; the first session is fully refundable within 48 hours.