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

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.