4 Reasons NOT To Include A Skills Section On A Resume And How To Fix It

Show, don’t tell.

If you’ve read previous articles in our Career Center, hopefully this is something you’ve seen me say again and again.

It’s far better to show recruiters what you’ve accomplished using your skills rather than simply telling the recruiter what you can do.

Doing so accomplishes two things:

1. It highlights the value-add you could potentially deliver to the recruiter’s firm, which is ultimately what the company wants from you.
2. It conserves precious resume real estate by killing two birds with one stone: If you weave your skills into your resume accomplishment bullets, you don’t need to have a separate skills section on your resume to tell the recruiter what you can do.

So when clients show me initial drafts of their resume, the first thing I do is advise them to not include a skills section on their resume.

Frequently, I hear this advice goes against conventional wisdom they’ve heard (especially if they’ve designed their resume to be a “functional resume,” so I want to use this article to explain my rationale on eliminating resume skills sections and provide actionable steps to fix the problem.

Let’s get started!

The Problem: Why Including A Skills Section In A Resume Is A Bad Idea

Bamboozling Your Recruiter With A Skills Section

Look, I get it.

You want to tell the recruiter, “Hey, I can do this job! Hire me! Hire me!”

And it’s easy to list off the 8 million things that you can do.

But that’s not what the company cares about.

What the company cares about is how much $$$ you can make.

Specifically, what is your impact to the company’s bottom line / profits? Your accomplishments need to either increase revenues or decrease costs, indirectly or directly, as shown in the simple equation below:

Revenue — Costs = Profit

No one will hire you if you cost more than the uplift in profits you generate. It’s hard enough for the company to tell whether you’re a profitable employee at the job application stage of the hiring process, but most applicants make it even harder by not showing the recruiter in their job application how much they’ve helped their prior employers’ bottom lines.

Instead, they bamboozle the recruiter with a separate skills section.

Here’s what this does:

1. The skills section has a high opportunity cost for your resume. Frequently, clients will consume 20–30% of their resume real estate for their skills section, eating up valuable space that the applicant could have otherwise used to showcase their key, relevant accomplishments.
2. It wreaks havoc on the flow of the resume. The recruiter has to switch focus from absorbing your education and/or professional experience section to your skills section (and vice versa), which breaks the flow. Any flow breakage makes your resume more difficult to read, and when you only have a few precious seconds to catch the recruiter’s attention, this is the equivalent of the death sentence for your job application.
3. You provide no context as to how the recruiter should interpret your skills section. For example, your recruiter sees: “Jira, SQL, Excel.” What is he or she supposed to do with this information? Without relevant accomplishments from using these skills, the recruiter has no context as to your skill level.
4. As a fix for the third point, you might attempt to get “creative” with your skills section. Such as including fancy colors or graphics in the form of “skill level indicators” or worse. This does nothing for the recruiter as the graphics have no inherent meaning/baseline and don’t do anything to inform the recruiter of your money-making abilities.
5. If you do provide context, you’ll give a biased point-of-view, which the recruiter will obviously discount. Of course you’ll say that your skills are “advanced” since you want to present yourself in the best light. But what does “advanced” really mean?
6. If you overexaggerate your skills on your resume, the recruiter may ask you to prove yourself in the interview. Let’s say you pass the resume screen with an extra-fancy skills section. You might be able to talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? I’ve seen recruiters start conducting the interview in German for one candidate who put “fluent in German” on her resume.

Hopefully, at this point, it’s quite clear why you shouldn’t include a separate skills section.

The only exception to this rule is if you have critically relevant and valuable skills that aren’t necessarily tied to any of your key accomplishments.

In that case, you could include them in a simple one-liner format down in the Personal Interests and Skills section at the bottom of your resume with simple qualifiers like “Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced.” This skills should be relatively well-known enough such that the recruiter has a reference point as to what “Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced” means.

A common use case would be languages, which typically have universal applicability.

Even if you do call out these skills separately, you should only include skills that would directly or indirectly monetarily benefit the employer. Such skills usually should have been developed to the advanced level, so don’t bother including your Spanish-speaking skills if you can only say Hola.

Refuting Client Counterarguments To Having A Skills Section

Usually clients balk pretty hard when I tell them I’m going to reformat their skills section.

Completely understandable, especially since “include a skills section on your resume” is advice some of my clients have heard their entire professional careers.

To help you come to terms with saying goodbye to your resume skills section, I’ll refute the most common client counterarguments below:

1. How will the recruiter know I can do the job?
2. How will recruiters know how good I am at each of my skills?
3. How will my resume pass the Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?
4. What if my position isn’t inherently an “impact-generating” role (and therefore I think I need a separate skills section)?

How Will The Recruiter Know I Can Do The Job?

Some clients believe in extreme directness.

They want to tell the recruiter explicitly that they’re capable of doing the job by specifically calling out their skills in a resume skills section.

But you don’t need to do this.

If you want the recruiter to know that you can do the job, show them through the accomplishments you’ve achieved with those skills.

If you show the recruiter you convinced key stakeholders to invest $5M into a new marketing campaign from data pulled with SQL, I guarantee you that’s much more impressive than simply telling the recruiter you know SQL in a resume skills section.

That way, they’ll definitely know you can do the job (and way more)!

How Will The Recruiter Know How Good I Am At Each Of My Skills?

Some clients believe in visual communication.

They want to tell recruiters explicitly how good they are at each of the skills they put in the skills section of their resume, either with fancy graphics or granular qualifiers.

But like how I refuted the previous counterargument, you can do so by showing the recruiter the magnitude of impact you had for each of your skills.

Going back to the SQL example, demonstrating that you influenced key stakeholders to reallocate millions of dollars of marketing spend with your SQL skills automatically implies an advanced understanding of SQL.

Much better than simply stating in a resume skills section, “Advanced SQL knowledge.”

By weaving your skills into your accomplishments, you qualify them without having to waste space boringly stating that you’re “advanced.”

How Will My Resume Pass The Applicant Tracking System (ATS)?

Some clients believe in resume keyword optimization.

For reference, an Applicant Tracking System, or ATS, is software designed to facilitate management of a company’s recruiting process by parsing information from cover letters, resumes, and other pieces of a job application.

Given the rise in usage of ATS across the recruiting landscape, many of our clients have tried to optimize their resumes to pass the ATS screens by specifically including keywords they think the ATS looks for through a skills section.

While it’s true that ATS may filter out your resume if it fails to find relevant keywords, you can still merge your skills section into your professional experience section and retain those relevant keywords.

For example, if ATS is looking for “SQL” as a keyword, you can retain “SQL” in your resume by rewording your professional experience bullet points to include accomplishments related to “SQL.”

A perfect example:

• Spearheaded a $5M marketing spend reallocation by influencing key stakeholders with relevant data pulled using SQL

So ATS finds its “SQL” keyword in your resume AND you remove the need for a separate skills section.

A win-win!

What If My Position Isn’t Inherently An “Impact-generating” Role?

Some clients believe in self-limiting principles.

I’ve had clients come to me with the assumption that since their role isn’t directly tied to revenue generation, they can’t find any examples of how to tie their skills to key accomplishments.

And so they need to have a separate skills section that details what they can do.

That simply isn’t true.

Everyone has the opportunity to generate impact in an organization, from the janitor to the desk clerk to the CEO.

You just need to:

1. Find ways to deliver impact.
2. Frame your experiences in such a way as to showcase your impact.

Take for example a cashier. You might think that a cashier doesn’t have that much opportunity to generate impact. But, if you were a cashier, ask yourself the following questions:

1. How many people do you service each day?
2. Were you able to convince anyone to buy more than they initially were going to?
3. Did you remind customers to use coupons they otherwise wouldn’t have?
4. Did you provide excellent customer service that won you any awards?
5. Did you suggest implementing any processes that improved efficiency?
6. Did you influence coworkers to perform better?
7. Did you make your boss’s life easier in any way?

You could take the answers to any of these questions and transform it into an impact resume bullet point with a skill.

For instance:

• Saved $10K in monthly labor costs by influencing manager with real-time data to implement self-checkout kiosks that reduced labor hours by 15%

Much better than simply stating that you can “influence” people or possess “leadership” in a skills section.

Convincing your boss to undertake a major investment that produced actual results? Now that’s real impact.

Now that you’re on board with integrating your resume’s skills section into your professional experience section, let’s walkthrough how to do it!

The Solution: How To Integrate Your Skills Section Into Your Professional Experience Section

Integrating your skills section into your professional experience section is a 2-part process.

First, think about key accomplishments that match up with skills in your skills section.

Second, rewrite your bullets in your resume’s professional experience section such that they describe the impact you made with your skills.

Here’s an example. Let’s say that your skills section looks like this:

Skills

• JIRA
• SQL
• Excel
• Balsamiq
• Google Tag Manager
• Google Analytics
• Tableau
• Python
• TestRail
• Project Management
• Slack
• Quip

Think about what key accomplishments you might have accomplished with those skills.

Let’s pick SQL, Excel, and Tableau. You might have achieved the following with these skills:

• Saved man-hours
• Influenced / convinced a key stakeholder

Then, re-write your existing bullet points with these skills in mind:

• Saved 100 weekly man-hours by building a Tableau dashboard that tracked and optimized engineering time spent
• Convinced management to invest $15M in penetrating a greenfield Asian market with SQL-pulled data
• Generated a 25% IRR from influencing management to invest in a SMB retail turnaround with an Excel financial model

Easy-peasy!

Do this for as many skills as you can in your current resume skills section. You don’t have to apply this method to every skill — just the ones for which you demonstrated impact.

If you can’t think of any impact you’ve generated using a skill, consider removing it from your resume skills section, or transfer it to the bottom of your resume in this format.

And with that, you’ll find your resume reads much easier with more space to elaborate on your relevant experience and key accomplishments.

Final Thoughts On Resume Skills Section

Sometimes you have to go against conventional wisdom to stand out from the crowd.

And who knows how incorrect this conventional “wisdom” can be?

As an example, I recently refuted 17 pieces of bad cover letter advice that ended up on the first three pages of Google’s search results. Tens of thousands of people flock to these articles daily, disseminating this bad advice to the ends of the earth.

The conventional “wisdom” that you need a separate resume skills section to tell the recruiter you can do the job is dead wrong.

Instead, show the recruiter your skills by weaving them into accomplishment bullets in your resume’s professional experience section.

You’ll improve your resume’s flow, enhance your relevant experience and accomplishments, and, ultimately, land more jobs.

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