Skills to Put on a Resume: 120 by Role, and Where They Go

A recruiter can tell in one glance whether your skills section was written for their job or copied from a template. So can the applicant tracking system (ATS) that reads the resume before any human does. Bare entries like "communication" and "team player" match nothing a recruiter searches for, and they crowd out the terms that would have matched.

Most articles on this topic hand you 100 interchangeable words and wish you luck. This one does two things differently. The 120 skills below are grouped by job family, because the right skills for a medical assistant have almost nothing in common with the right skills for a backend engineer. And every skill comes with a placement column that answers the question the other lists skip entirely: does this belong in your skills list, in a bullet under a job, or in both places?

The placement question matters more than the vocabulary. Hiring is shifting toward screening for demonstrated skills rather than titles and degrees, and that screening starts with software matching exact terms. A skill in the wrong place is a skill the pipeline never sees.

An ATS reads hard skills. It does not read soft skills in any meaningful way, and this single fact should reorganize your whole skills section.

Hard skills are nouns. Python, Epic, QuickBooks, Salesforce, ICD-10. When a recruiter filters 400 applicants down to 40, they search for these nouns, and the software matches them as literal strings. If the posting says "Google Analytics" and your resume says "web analytics tools," you did the work and still missed the match.

Soft skills are claims. "Leadership" in a skills list is an assertion with no evidence attached, and recruiters have learned to ignore it there. The same skill lands when it appears as a bullet: "Trained four new hires on the closing procedure, all four passed their 30-day review." Nobody searches for the word "training" in a filter, but every human who reads that bullet believes it.

So the working rule is this: hard skills feed the software, soft skills persuade the human, and each belongs where its audience looks. I break down the evidence question in more depth in hard skills vs. soft skills on your resume.

How to read the tables. "Skills list" means the skill goes in your dedicated skills section as a searchable noun. "A bullet" means it needs evidence and belongs under a job with a result attached. "Both" means it is central enough to the role that it should appear twice, once for the filter and once as proof. A few entries point to your certifications section instead, because that is where recruiters look for them.

One rule overrides everything in these tables. Match the employer's wording, not mine. If the posting says "Microsoft Excel," write "Microsoft Excel," not "spreadsheets." For a deeper term bank sorted by title, see the ATS resume keywords list.

Specificity wins here. "Cloud platforms" matches no filter; "AWS" does. Name the exact languages and services you have shipped with, not the category they belong to.

Employers filter on tools first and judge the thinking in your bullets second. The data analyst resume example shows how the two work together on a real page.

Platforms are the hard skills in marketing. "Digital marketing" is a category, and categories do not survive a keyword filter. Name the ad platforms and the email tools you have actually run.

Sales skills are mostly proven in bullets because the skill and the number are inseparable. "Quota attainment" means nothing in a list; "118% of quota in FY2025" means everything in a bullet.

Methodology terms are searchable here, so Agile and Scrum earn a place in the list. Credentials like PMP or CSM go in a certifications section, where recruiters expect to find them; see where to put certifications on a resume.

Searches in this family often start with the ERP name. List NetSuite or SAP exactly as the posting writes it, and let the process skills like month-end close appear both in the list and in a dated, quantified bullet.

Clinical resumes get screened on systems and credentials before anything else. Epic experience is a real filter in many hospital systems, so it belongs in your skills list even when it feels like stating the obvious.

The trap in admin roles is listing only the obvious software. Calendar ownership and vendor work are the differentiators, so give them bullets with real scale, such as how many executives or how large a budget.

Most skills in this family are proven on the floor, which means bullets. The list carries the systems, and ServSafe goes with your certifications. If you are writing a first-job resume, cash handling and a named POS system beat any personality trait.

Districts screen resumes on pedagogy terms, so "differentiated instruction" and "IEP" earn their place in the list verbatim. Everything about outcomes belongs in bullets with student data attached.

Use one test. Would a recruiter type this skill into a search filter? If yes, it goes in the skills list. If the skill is a claim that needs evidence, it goes in a bullet under the job where you used it. If it sits at the center of the role you want, it goes in both places, once as the searchable noun and once as the proof.

Here is what "both" looks like in practice for an account manager. The skills list contains the single word "Salesforce." Then a bullet under the current job reads, "Grew a 90-account territory 24% year over year, managing the full renewal pipeline in Salesforce." The list entry survives the keyword filter. The bullet survives the human read. Neither works alone.

Soft skills never appear as bare list items on a strong resume. A recruiter who reads "leadership, communication, problem-solving" in a skills section learns nothing except that you have seen other resumes. The same recruiter reading "presented monthly performance reviews to the VP of Sales and two regional directors" now believes you can communicate upward, and you never had to say the word. Show the behavior, and the trait takes care of itself.

Eight to twelve in the dedicated skills section, for most people. Fewer than eight looks thin. More than twelve reads as padding and, worse, dilutes the terms that matter, because a recruiter scanning a 25-item list gives each item less weight.

Technical resumes are the exception, and the fix is grouping rather than cutting. A developer can carry twenty legitimate skills by organizing them into labeled lines, such as "Languages" on one line and "Infrastructure" on another, so the section stays scannable. For worked layouts of both approaches, see these resume skills section examples.

The deeper point is that eight to twelve is a budget, and budgets force choices. Every generic entry you keep is a specific, posting-matched entry you gave up. Spend the slots on the nouns this employer filters for.

These entries cost you space and signal nothing. Some actively hurt, because they tell the reader you have not updated the resume in years.

The tables above are a starting inventory, and that is all any list can be. The skills section that gets you the interview is written against one posting. Here is the manual process, which takes about ten minutes per job.

The full method, including how to handle requirements you only partially meet, is in how to check your resume against a job description.

Doing this by hand across ten open applications is where most people quit, which is the honest reason tailored resumes are rare. Roleframe compresses the tedious part. You duplicate your base resume for a job, and the fit report shows the exact keywords the posting screens for, which ones your resume already covers, and which are gaps, with an ATS score and a prioritized plan. Then you make the edits yourself, with Remi suggesting rewrites bullet by bullet and you approving every change. The words stay yours, so you can defend them in the interview.