In this blog, we’ll cover everything you need to know about strengths to put on a resume, including:
Playing to your strengths is one of the biggest career moves that can lead to improved performance and more recognition at work. It all starts with taking some time to assess your abilities and how to best incorporate them into your job, according to the Harvard Business Review.
The strengths are the strong points of your resume. They can come in the form of knowledge or skills you’ve mastered, or they might be the qualities of the resume itself that make the hiring manager stop and take notice of you. In this blog, we’ll talk about all of these different types of strengths to put on a resume.
Recruiters spend 80 percent of their time looking at only six data points on a resume, Mashable reports. Among them: Name, current position and company and education. Keeping key pieces of information clear and easy to find is one of the biggest resume strengths to include.
Now let’s take a look at the other type of resume strengths: your core abilities that make you an excellent hire for the role. What are your greatest strengths? What are the strengths of a good employee? While the best personal strengths for your resume will depend somewhat on your field and experience level, here are some global examples of good resume strengths to write on any resume and a breakdown of their components:
The ability to think critically about the company’s objectives and your role within them will show a hiring manager that you’re a candidate who will pay back dividends.
You can break these down into:
Great communication skills are a strength that never goes out of style. You can showcase your ability to express yourself clearly and effectively not only through your work-related examples but also with the right tone and error-free writing of your resume itself.
Communication is a set of skills that includes:
There’s a reason why “ problem-solving” and “solutions-oriented” are job description buzzwords – hiring managers are looking for candidates who can look at a problem from multiple angles and tackle it with a positive attitude. Resourcefulness is a core resume strength for any great application.
Resourcefulness can seem vague, so try using one of these strengths on your resume:
Like communication, teamwork is a strength as old as time, yet just as in demand today as ever when talking about strengths in resumes. Often rebranded as “collaboration,” teamwork means you are nimble enough to lead or follow as needed and can bring the best out of your colleagues to achieve results.
But teamwork is really an umbrella for the following strengths for your resume:
This in-demand group of strengths refers to the ability to manage your emotions and understand the feelings of those around you. It translates into these important on-the-job strengths:
Finding strengths to write on a resume as a fresher (that's “freshman” in the U.S.) or a new graduate can be daunting. However, it’s important to remember that some of the best strengths for your resume are the ones you already possess. By focusing on your personality traits or innate talents you can show a hiring manager that your strengths are ones they’d have a hard time teaching in someone who doesn’t naturally possess them.
Here are some examples of resume strengths for those with little experience:
Ask yourself what strengths the company would be looking for in a candidate for the job you’re seeking. Reverse-engineer the problem by looking at it from the employer’s perspective. The strengths the company is seeking might be very different for a salesman, a computer tech or an HR manager. Identify the company’s needs first, and then list your strengths accordingly.
Once you’ve identified the core resume strengths to list, you’ll need to make a plan for incorporating them. There are three main areas where you’ll want to focus on adding strengths to your resume:
Include strengths using the exact language from the job description to make it easier for resume scanners and hiring managers to find what they’re looking for. Make sure you offer examples of how you apply each strength instead of merely listing them.
Stuff your resume with qualifications that are untrue for you or don’t make sense in the section where you’ve added them.
First, let’s take a look at some of the strengths that can make your resume stand out no matter what field you work in:
One of the worst ways to highlight your strengths is to fall back on common resume cliches. The following terms are used in resumes so often that they’ve become somewhat meaningless:
Communication skills, for example, are very important, but when everyone claims to have communication skills, this phrase won’t set you apart. Be more specific. Are you a “dynamic public speaker”? “Excellent listener”? “Able to communicate policies effectively to staff”? “Skilled at customer interaction”? Say so.
One of the most challenging questions candidates face in job interviews has to do with their weaknesses. It’s important to reflect before the job interview so that you can come prepared with examples of weaknesses that don’t disqualify you from the position. Your weaknesses should be sincere and accurate, but shouldn’t involve a major skill needed for the job.