Skills to Include

• Study the profile of the position to which you are applying. Using this information, select the soft skills to highlight. A few examples that hold true in most cases include communication skills, interpersonal skills, team player attitude, integrity and enthusiasm. While these skills suffice for entry-level jobs, positions of greater responsibility call for more selective abilities such as conflict management, planning and organization, leadership and motivation, problem solving and decision making.
  
  

Provide Context

• An employer can easily verify the technical skills and experience you quote in the resume. Soft skills cannot be checked as easily. Unless you provide a context for the skills you highlight, it is quite possible that someone will consider them as hollow claims. If you say you are an enthusiastic team player, or that you can work well without supervision, provide relevant background in the cover letter you attach with your resume. For example, you could list the achievements and accolades you won during a particular project. There, you could highlight the soft skills that made the difference.
  
  

Give Specifics

• Rather than a simple bulleted list of your soft skills, provide specific details of the problem and how you tackled it. For example, saying that you have good coordination or problem solving skills does not distinguish you from hundreds of other applicants who claim the same thing. What sets you apart is a specific illustration: "Worked in tandem with representatives from Finance, Sales and Marketing to develop five cost-saving procedures." Use major incidents that you handled well--training subordinates, speeding up processes, resolving client peeves--to draw attention to your soft skills.
  
  

Prepare to Expand

• Choose the soft skills to emphasize depending on the number of examples you can provide for each. Don't list soft skills you don't have many, or any, examples for. Interviewers may ask about these skills, and you don't want to fumble through your answer. Have distinct examples ready. For example, to demonstrate your communication skills, quote examples that include explaining technical topics clearly to clients, working as a team player, listening with empathy to a co-worker, and networking with others to develop business leads.