Resume hacks: 10 tips for cherry-picking skills to land the job

Your resume is more than just a list of qualifications and achievements—it’s your store-front and marketing tool for showcasing your skills, getting you past the Applicant Tracking System, catching the recruiter or hiring manager’s eye, and landing you an interview … No pressure! Crafting the perfect resume is hard, and if you think yours is boring, the chances are the person reading it will too. So, how do you make your resume interesting? How do you choose what to include if you have a long and varied career? How can you convince a hiring manager that you’re worth an interview (and ultimately the job!) if you don’t have all the skills in the job description? Career coach and resume writer Mark Misiano answers these questions and more with his 10 tips on cherry-picking skills for your resume. And guess what? It’s not all about keywords and the ATS.

1. Focus on hard skills

In Misiano’s opinion, hard skills are usually what gets you in the door, so he recommends focusing on those. Include them in prominent areas on your resume, like a ‘core competencies’ or ‘areas of expertise’ section. Think about how you present them. If you’re a software expert with a huge list of programs, systems, and tools, highlight the ones that are most relevant to the role, or consider alphabetizing a longer list so that it’s easy for the recruiter to spot the one they’re looking for. Make use of white space, bullet points, and color accents to ensure your hard skills are clear and easy to read.

2. Start with job descriptions

When you’re putting together a resume, you should be looking at tailoring it to the sort of roles you want to apply for. Misiano makes the distinction between tailoring and targeting your resume. Tailoring means focusing on the types of roles you are looking at and creating something that would work for ‘quick apply’ job posts. Targeting is when your resume is aimed at a specific role in a specific company—the one you really want.

Misiano explains his process for tailoring a resume: “Whenever I’m working with a client. I’ll make sure I get from them several different job descriptions for roles that they are interested in pursuing, and honestly, I use AI in different ways to identify what those keywords should be. I’m going to ask a tool like ChatGPT to identify for me the most common keywords and phrases that it sees amongst those job descriptions, so I know the types of language that I should be using in adapting and pulling out of my clients’ experiences to inform how we communicate their value on the resume.” He adds an important caveat, “I don’t allow it to influence what I write but I do allow it to influence the terminology that I choose.”

When you’re targeting a particular job, you can take that specific job description and tweak your resume to fit. Misiano says, “Look at the job description, especially the first several bullet points, under the qualifications or the required skills or what you see as the duties and responsibilities for that role. You can dive into those making sure, especially for the top three to five, that you’re speaking to those very specifically, not only in keywords but in value too.”

3. Only include skills you actually have

When you’re pulling keywords and phrases from a job description it can be tempting to include everything, just to get a foot in the door. The problem, says Misiano, is that “you run the risk then of being invited in for an interview, and having to speak to the skills that you claimed, and not being able to tell stories or talk about experiences in that area.” Only include the skills as they apply to you. If you’ve never managed a project don’t include project management because if you do make it to the interview, you won’t be able to prove your expertise. This may mean you won’t get an interview, but at least you’re being honest, you’re likely to fall down at some point if your resume is based on lies.

4. Don’t miss an opportunity because of different naming conventions

Different people, companies, and job descriptions have different ways of describing skills and experiences, so don’t miss out on an opportunity because you’re used to describing your experience differently. In Misiano’s words, “There are instances where I have to tell people, ‘Hey you’ve done this skill, you have this skill, you’ve just never called it that before!’” This is particularly true when it comes to transferrable skills or moving between different industries. Misiano says that AI can be a big help in this area too, you can enter your skill and get an answer as to whether it is similar enough to another skill to be called that. For example, conflict resolution could be called mediation, handling negotiations, solving disputes, relationship management, and so on.

5. Don’t include absolutely everything

Cherry-picking your resume skills means exactly that: only including things that are relevant and interesting for the role you’re applying to. Misiano believes that having a huge list under core competencies, areas of expertise, or skills and qualifications actually dilutes the power of what you include because it makes it seem like you don’t specialize in anything. His advice? “Be specific, and use the job description to guide what you actually put in that section.” You might have 30 skills but what are the top 8-10 that you have for the role? Use and highlight those—it will be much more effective.

6. Feel like you have nothing special to offer?

Sometimes it’s not a case of having to narrow down skills, but of having to find them in the first place. Misiano shares, “People look back at their experiences—especially folks that have either been in the same industry for a long time, the same job for a long time, or the same company for a long time—and they look at themselves and [say] ‘Oh well this is nothing special this is just what I do every day,’ and it takes a little bit of convincing at times to say, your every day is someone else’s amazing!”

He asks his clients to just talk about what they do every day because, for almost every single person, every day is different. “They’ll talk for 20 minutes about their job not realizing that all of these are outcomes and accomplishments. So when you look back at your professional experiences, remember that just because you did it, and it just seemed routine to you, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t awesome or impressive,” he explains. Give yourself credit where credit is due. He encourages his clients to “think about what you’re proud of, because if you’re proud of it you get to own it, and when you own it we can put it on the resume and make it stronger, we can include the right keywords with it and then you can walk into the interview and talk about it.”

7. If you need a skill, consider learning it and adding it

If you’re noticing a particular skill come up in a lot of the jobs you want to apply for and it’s one that you don’t have, it might be worth spending some time learning it so that you can include it proudly and honestly. Misiano suggests adding it to your resume as soon as you start learning, with a completion date to show it’s a work in progress. Another bonus to updating your resume with new skills as soon as you start learning is it helps to develop the mentality of a lifelong learner—the more you learn the more you want to learn. Misiano explains that this gets people excited and boosts their confidence. “When they see it on paper it helps them enter with their heads held a little higher. They believe in themselves because they are building their skills.”

To illustrate, Misiano shares a story: “I had a client who really wanted a job with this software company and they listed different programs, applications, tools, systems that they wanted someone to know, and he didn’t know them. So, we strategized and we planned and he said, ‘I’m going to take two months and I’m going to do as much learning on those systems as I can, number one: we can claim them on the resume, and number two: I can walk in and actually speak to, I know what those screens look like, I know what those systems do, I know how to use them.’ He ended up getting a job at this company.”

8. Be creative when including soft skills

Do you even need soft skills on a resume? Arguably it’s something you showcase more in an interview than on paper. Misiano says it depends on the nature of the role you’re applying for. A CEO might need to include more soft skills, whereas engineering roles will have a greater focus on hard skills. Misiano says soft skills are harder to include because it’s difficult to sound unique and to distinguish yourself from other people when you talk about them. “Soft skills are so generic and honestly, so boring and have lost all meaning because we overuse them. The number of times I see written and verbal communication skills on a resume … Let’s find a different way to describe it.”

So, how exactly do you go about that? Misiano has a formula:

Soft skill + Hard skill = Accomplishment

Think of what you’ve accomplished in your role and then think about how you achieved that, weave soft skills into the content rather than listing them.

For example:

“Able to achieve 0% employee turnover for a full year or 18 months based on an open door policy of active listening and empathy.”

Or

“Grew profits by 90% in two years by launching a new product I determined was important by ‘seeing around the corner’ before a shift in the industry.”

Evidencing your soft skills gives a much greater impact.

9. Don’t write for the Applicant Tracking System

Misiano believes that people are overly concerned with the ATS. In his experience, you aren’t being rejected because you didn’t keyword optimize well. He likens the ATS to a ‘big filing cabinet’ and says that if you talk to recruiters you know that, usually if candidates are auto-rejected it’s because of a knockout question they’ve added, or with systems that are smart enough because you don’t have the requisite number of years’ experience in a specific role. You might have all the keywords there, but if you haven’t held the role of customer success manager for three years, you’re out, and you can’t change your job title to make it work.

It’s not about making sure the word ‘accounting’ appears in your resume 15 times. So write for the person reading your resume—they’re the ones with the power. “I don’t want to rely on a computer that’s programmed by humans with biases and faults. I want to go directly to the person who’s making the decision and showcase that I have all the skills by including the right keywords so that they’re confident I can walk in and contribute to that job on day one. So I always write with the person in mind.”

10. It’s not all about keywords

Keywords are not the thing that’s going to get you in the door. According to Misiano, “If you’re click, click, clicking and then sitting on your hands and waiting for something to happen, you’re doing it wrong. We optimize keywords so that when a person looks at it [they say] ‘Wow check, check, check, you’ve got all the skills that I need you to have!’ We write for the person because the job search strategy is that you’re building relationships, you’re getting to know people, you’re reaching out for curious conversations, you’re talking to folks in the industry and that’s what lands you in front of the hiring manager.”

You need to employ a lot of different aspects of your job search strategy to make the resume as strong as possible for the application process, but then go beyond that and make the effort to get in front of people. Rely on relationship building, not a bank of words.

Key takeaways

Cherry-picking skills for your resume gives you the opportunity to truly showcase how your experience matches the job description, and that should be your first reference when deciding what to include. Taking the time to craft a targeted and tailored resume will increase your chances of standing out to hiring managers.

• Focus on hard skills and display them in prominent places.
• Demonstrate soft skills creatively rather than in a list.
• Be authentic, if you don’t have the skills start learning!
• Don’t get hung up on the ATS, write for the humans.
• Remember, your resume is just one part of your job search strategy.

Photo: Welcome to the Jungle

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