Skills to Put on a Job Application: How to Pick Them

Where skills go on a job application

An online application usually asks for your skills in more than one place, and each place works a little differently:

• Your resume. Uploaded or pasted into the form. Its skills section and your bullet points are both read.
• A skills field or picker. Some forms let you type skills or pick them from a list. In Workday, for example, the admin guide says "Candidates can select suggested skills when applying to a job."
• Screening questions. Yes or no questions ("Do you have two years of experience with Excel?"), years of experience, or short written answers.
• A free-text box. Fields like "Additional information" or "Why are you a good fit?", where a sentence or two about your top skills for this job fits well.

Treat them as one application. The skills you pick in a list should also be in your resume, and your screening answers should not claim more than your resume shows.

How employers' software reads the skills you enter

When an employer uses an applicant tracking system, the software may compare your skills with the job before a person reads your application. What it does depends on the system and on what the employer turns on, but the official documentation for Workday, Greenhouse, and Indeed shows how it can work.

Workday's skills match compares the skills from your application and resume with the skills on the job. Its admin guide says "The skills match similarity improves as the skills on the job application match more of the job requisition," and "Workday assigns greater weight to job applications with the required skills specified on the job requisition." The recruiter also sees which of the job's skills were not found in your application.

Greenhouse lets recruiters search "the full text of resumes" for skills and other keywords, and its help page says "the keyword from your search must exactly match the keyword in the application." If the recruiter searches for "project management" and your resume says "managed projects", that search will not find you.

Indeed's Smart Screening, which employers can use on Indeed, gives each application a score from the resume, the screening question answers, location, and other application details. Indeed's employer help says "It only uses what the applicant submitted and the criteria you set." A skill you have but did not mention does not count.

Indeed notes that the employer still makes all hiring decisions. The software can shape which applications a recruiter looks at first, and the recruiter then reads for proof, so each skill you list needs the job's wording and something to back it up.

How to pick the skills for this job from the posting

The posting is the best list of skills you will get for that job. It was written by the people who will judge you. If you analyze the job in the HideJobs job tracker, you get its keywords already sorted by category to check against the posting. Either way, work through it like this:

• Mark the required skills. Look under "Requirements", "Qualifications", or "Must have". These matter most, and in Workday the skills a recruiter marks as required get greater weight in the match.
• Mark the preferred skills. "Nice to have" or "Preferred" items. Add the ones you have after the required ones.
• Scan the responsibilities. Skills often hide in the duties: "prepare monthly forecasts" means forecasting and spreadsheets even if the requirements list does not say so.
• Note what repeats. A skill mentioned two or three times is a skill the team cares about.
• Copy the exact words. Write "customer onboarding" if that is the posting's phrase, and include both an abbreviation and its full form when the posting uses one, such as "search engine optimization (SEO)".
• Drop what you cannot back up. Every skill you list is something you may be asked about.

An example

A made-up posting for an Office Coordinator asks for "proficiency in Microsoft Excel and Outlook", "scheduling and calendar management for a team of 20", "strong written communication", and, as nice to have, "experience with QuickBooks". A candidate who ran the front desk at a dental clinic might enter these skills, in this order: calendar management, scheduling, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, written communication, QuickBooks (basic). Then the resume backs them up: "Managed appointment calendars for 4 dentists and about 60 patients a day". The candidate leaves off "dental billing codes", a real skill that this job does not ask for.

The same skills should then show up in your bullet points as well as in the list. For how to write those, see how to write resume bullet points that pass ATS.

Hard skills, soft skills, and how to back up each one

Hard skills are things you can learn and test: software, languages, licenses, methods, equipment. Soft skills are how you work with people and problems: communication, teamwork, problem solving.

Employers want both. In the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Job Outlook 2026 Spring Update, a survey of employers who hire new college graduates, NACE reports that employers "want to see that candidates have the ability to work in a team, problem-solve, and communicate effectively," and that other qualities they value "include technical skills, a strong work ethic, and sharp analytical/quantitative skills."

For software, the U.S. Department of Labor's O*NET Hot Technologies list shows the technologies "most frequently included across all employer job postings." Microsoft Office software, Excel, and Outlook are at the top. If you use them, name each one ("Microsoft Excel") instead of writing a general term like "office software".

The two kinds need different proof:

• Hard skills are easy to list and easy to check. Name the tool or method and, where it helps, your level or a certificate: "Spanish (fluent)", "forklift certification", "Python (2 years, data cleaning)".
• Soft skills mean little as single words, because every applicant writes "team player". List them when the posting asks for them by name, and show them in a bullet or an answer: "trained 5 new hires on the returns process" shows communication and patience better than either word.

Transferable skills are both kinds, carried from one field to another. If you are changing careers, translate them into the new job's words. A teacher applying for a training role has "curriculum design" and "presenting to groups", and should write those phrases instead of "lesson planning" and "classroom teaching" if the posting uses them.

How many skills to list

There is no official number. Let the form and the posting decide:

• A skills field or picker: enter every required skill you have, then the preferred ones. The posting sets the count.
• A resume skills section: a short list of the skills that matter for this kind of job, grouped if it gets long (for example "Software" and "Languages").
• A free-text box: two or three skills with a line of proof each reads better than ten names.

Ten skills that match the job do more than twenty where half do not, because the extras make it harder for a recruiter skimming your application to find the ones that matter.

Mistakes that cost you on the skills part of an application

• One list for every job. A generic list only loosely fits any one job. Change the order and the wording for each posting.
• A form that disagrees with your resume. Five years of a skill in a screening answer and one job using it on your resume raises a question you will have to answer.
• Old or obvious skills. Software nobody uses anymore, or basics everyone is expected to have for the role, take space from the skills that set you apart.

Pull the skills out of each posting with HideJobs

Reading every posting closely for skills is the hardest part of tailoring. When you analyze a job in the HideJobs job tracker, it writes a short summary of the role and pulls out the posting's keywords, grouped into categories: Technical Skills, Soft Skills, Domain Knowledge, Required Job Skills, Industry Keywords, and Tools & Platforms.

1. In the job tracker, click Add Job and paste the posting into Job Description.
2. Open the job and, on its Description tab, click Analyze this job.
3. Read the keyword categories, and to keep track of another phrase, select it in the summary and click Add to Custom List.

The categories line up with the method above. Technical Skills and Tools & Platforms are the hard skills to enter in the form and your skills section, and Soft Skills are the ones to show with proof. Before you copy a phrase, turn on Show full description and check the posting's exact wording, since that is what an exact-match search looks for.

Then use them in your resume. The HideJobs resume builder has a Skills section where you can type several skills at once, separated by commas, and group them with Add Category. Connect the tracked job to your resume, and the AI writing for bullet points and the professional summary gets a Job Description tab, where you choose up to 3 of that job's keywords to work into the text.

The job stays in your tracker with its keywords, so when you get to the interview you can reread exactly which skills that posting asked for. If you apply through LinkedIn's own apply flow with the HideJobs browser extension installed and are logged in, those applications are added to the tracker automatically, and on Indeed and the other supported job sites you can add a job with Mark as Applied. To set up the tracker, see how to track job applications.