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Written and reviewed by the Resumarc team · Last reviewed 23 August 2026How we write our guidance
Which skills should you actually list?
The ones the job advert names, that you can evidence elsewhere on the page, and that a reasonable interviewer could test. Everything else is filler. A skills section is a set of claims, and each one is an invitation to be asked about it.
Read the advert and mark every named tool, method, and qualification. Those are the terms your resume needs to contain somewhere, because they are the terms a recruiter will scan for and a parser will match on.
The resume examples pages list the skills most often reported for each occupation, which is a useful cross-check against your own list.
Hard skills or soft skills?
Both, but they earn their place differently. Hard skills — tools, languages, certifications — belong in the skills section, where they can be scanned and matched. Soft skills belong in your bullets, demonstrated by something you did, because listing them proves nothing.
“Leadership” in a skills list is an assertion. “Led a team of six through a platform migration with no unplanned downtime” is evidence, and it makes the assertion unnecessary.
This is why the ratio matters more than the count. A section that is mostly hard skills reads as a specification; one that is mostly adjectives reads as padding.
How do applicant tracking systems read skills?
Mostly by matching text against the job description, which means wording is decisive. Write the term the way the advert writes it, spell out an acronym once alongside its short form, and keep the skills as plain text rather than inside a graphic or a table.
- Match the advert's phrasing: “JavaScript”, not “JS”, if that is what it says
- Give an acronym both forms once: “Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)”
- Avoid rating bars, star ratings, and skill graphics — a parser reads no value from them
- Keep the list as text in a normal section, not in a sidebar image
- Do not stuff terms you cannot defend; a recruiter will ask
The resume checker flags skills that are present as an image or trapped in a layout an ATS cannot read.
How many skills should you list?
Roughly eight to twelve. Below that the section looks thin; above it, the strong entries get diluted by the weak ones and the reader stops distinguishing between them. If a skill is central to the role, it should appear in your work history too, not only in the list.
A long list also invites a specific failure: it makes it obvious when the important skill is missing. A reader scanning twenty entries for the one the job requires, and not finding it, has learned something you did not intend to tell them.
FAQs
Key takeaways
- List skills the advert names and you can defend.
- Hard skills in the list, soft skills evidenced in your bullets.
- Write the term the way the job advert writes it.
- Eight to twelve entries; more dilutes the strong ones.
- Rating bars communicate less than plain text and parse as nothing.
Keep reading
Where to go next
Are your skills readable to software?
The free checker flags skills trapped in a graphic or a layout an applicant tracking system cannot parse.
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