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Key Takeaways In a competitive hiring market, the skills section of your resume is more important than ever.
Soft skills like communication and teamwork no longer help your resume stand out.
As expected, employers increasingly favor AI-related skills.
The hiring market is more competitive than ever, with more candidates competing for a smaller number of open roles, in part driven by the AI boom.
Job-seekers who want to stand out might consider upskilling — and a new study outlines exactly which skills are most likely to correlate with getting a job. Workforce solutions provider Careerminds analyzed 9,700 resumes and found that 20% of job-seekers who listed a technical skill got a new job, while only 14% of those whose resumes included soft skills got hired. People with technical skills were also 42% more likely to get hired.
Which technical skills stood out the most? Candidates who listed proficiency in Tableau, a data visualization software company, had the highest rate of hire, with more than 25% going on to land a job. Data analysis, Python and SQL also stood out to employers.
Although job-seekers frequently included soft skills on their resumes, they actually correlated with a lower rate of hire. Communication appeared on 16.4% of resumes but was associated with a 15.3% rate of hire. Soft skills like teamwork, leadership and customer service similarly underperformed.
“Anyone can claim to be a strong communicator, an effective leader or proficient in a particular technology,” said Amanda Augustine, a career coach, resume writer and resident career expert at Careerminds. “What makes that claim credible is showing where you’ve put that skill to work.”
AI skills are also valuable — though only 3% of resumes mentioned AI tools, job-seekers who listed AI-related skills were 1.4 times more likely to secure a new job.
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