How to Write a Resume Skills Section
September 8, 2026
“Skills based hiring” gets talked about constantly, but the real research behind it is more modest than the headlines suggest. A joint Harvard Business School and Burning Glass Institute study found that when employers formally dropped degree requirements, actual hiring barely moved, about 97,000 workers out of 77 million yearly hires, fewer than 1 in 700. Burning Glass Institute and Harvard Business School, 2024. The honest takeaway isn't that skills don't matter, it's that a policy announcement and an actual resume section are two different things. What genuinely does read your skills section closely, every application, isn't a new hiring philosophy, it's the ATS software scoring your resume before a person sees it.
Why the skills section carries real weight in ATS scoring
Keyword relevance is one of the core categories ATS software actually scores a resume on, alongside formatting, quantified impact, and clarity, and a dedicated skills section is the most concentrated place on the page to put the exact terms a posting is scanning for. A skill buried once inside a paragraph of a job description is easy for a parser to miss entirely, the same term in a dedicated skills section is unambiguous.
Keep it a flat, specific list, not a rated inventory
Skip star ratings, percentage bars, or proficiency labels next to each skill, a reader has no way to verify “Excel: 90%” and it reads as decoration rather than information. What actually works is a flat list of specific, named skills, “SQL,” “Salesforce administration,” “Adobe Premiere,” entered and ordered by relevance to the role you're applying for. ResuMakeAi's builder captures skills exactly this way, one tag at a time in the order you add them, deliberately without a rating system to fill in, because the rating rarely adds information a hiring manager or an ATS actually uses.
Specific tools beat generic traits every time
“Team player” and “strong communication skills” describe almost every applicant and match nothing specific in an ATS scan. “Kubernetes,” “SOX compliance,” “Google Ads,” “Figma” are the kind of terms a posting actually searches for and a reader can verify. See resume keywords for the fuller version of this distinction, wording that's specific enough to mean something versus wording that could apply to anyone.
Let a real posting tell you what's missing
Guessing at which skills to list is slower and less accurate than checking against a real posting directly. The free ATS and job match checker compares your resume against a specific job description and names the skills it's missing by name, so the skills section fills in with terms that specific posting is actually scanning for, not a generic industry list.
Only list what you can speak to in an interview
A skill listed to match a posting but never actually used is a real risk the moment an interviewer asks a follow up question about it. Add a term because a job posting is scanning for it only where it's genuinely true of your background, a resume that overreaches on skills tends to fail later in the process instead of earlier, which is a worse outcome.
FAQ
How many skills should be in the section?
There's no fixed number worth targeting. A short list of skills that genuinely match the posting reads better than a long list padded with anything you've ever touched, quality and relevance matter more than count.
Should soft skills go in the skills section at all?
Generally no, a soft skill like “leadership” is more convincing shown through a quantified achievement in your experience section than named on its own in a list, where it reads as an unverified claim rather than evidence.
Should I group skills into categories, like technical versus soft skills?
It's optional and adds little for most resumes, a flat, well ordered list of specific, relevant skills reads just as clearly and takes up less space than subcategories that mostly just repeat the obvious.