You specified your hard skills in your skills section. Good job!
Now, to prove to us that you have really gained those hard skills, you’ll need to add them to your experience, education, achievements or other section. Here is what you should do if you still keep having this red message.
1. Enter one hard skill at a time
Make sure you enter hard skill one by one by pressing enter after each skill. You should see each skill separated.
It should look like a list of skills, and not all skills in one line.
2. Only enter hard skills in your hard skills section
Hard skill is what you know. They are typically learned through education or experience, such as proficiency with specific software, languages, tools or specialized processes, methods.
Soft skill is how you act. They are skills such as “detail oriented”, “team player”, “hard-working” and are less likely to be searched by recruiters. In addition, they are often seen as fluffy, as buzzwords, and mean little without evidence.
U.S. recruiters expect you to be very precise in your hard skills section by specifying the name of the tools, languages, methods, processes, softwares you are proficient with.
For example: ‘Project Management’ is not a hard skill as it’s not a language, tool, software or method. It’s more like a job field. However, with your experience in project management, you may have gained hard skills by using project management software like ‘Jira’ or project management method like ‘Agile’.
Move all your soft skills in “Soft Skills” section. Specify your field in your job title, study major or courses instead. And for each of your them, specify the hard skills you have gained (names of software, tool, method and language). If you do not have hard skills, that’s completely fine! Just leave it blank.
PS: do not specify your foreign languages (English, French, etc.) in your skills section as there is a specific section for them.
3. Specify where you have acquire this skills
Now that you have specified the names of tools, softwares, languages, methods, it’s going to be easier for you to add those in your experience, education, achievements or other sections.
You will have to enter each hard skill as you have entered it in your hard skill section.
For example; you have ‘Google’s AdWords‘ in your hard skills section, you have used it in your experience of SEO Manager. You have to specify it in the concerned job task like this:
- Designed, executed, and optimized digital marketing campaign on Google’s AdWords for $20B CPG company, yielding 20% ROI improvements
Do this for all of your hard skills. You can enter them in your experience, education, achievements or even in your ‘other’ section.
Tips: type your hard skill in the job task, and see our suggestions!
