Personality vs. Soft Skills

By Soozy G. Miller, CPRW, CDCC, CDP

One of my colleagues, who runs a very successful resume writing firm, stated that hard skills are more important than soft skills and that soft skills are more or less personality traits:

“High-priority keywords are based on academic, technical, and professional skills… they are not soft skills, which are typically personality descriptors.”

WHOA. As you probably can guess, I totally disagree with this, and I actually find it quite misleading.

There is a lot to unpack here, so for now I will just concentrate on the soft skills = personality descriptors part.

It is true that you don’t want “personality descriptors” in your resume. You don’t want to show your personality in your resume by putting “good communicator” or “hard worker” or “inspiring leader” because those are too general and there is no way to really prove them until you start working for the company.

And it’s true that your resume is not a “personality” demonstration. At its best and most powerful, the resume is a detailed and focused unemotional marketing tool that you use to prove to a company why you are the best person for the job.

This means that you show how you:

• Increase revenue

• Solved a big problem

• Influenced an important decision

• Improved team productivity

• Improved compliance

• Used data to fix something

These are all soft skills. Nowhere in the list above is personality a factor.

I use DISC methodology to determine behavior and communication strengths. DISC is NOT a personality test. There are no right and wrong answers, and DISC is double data verified, EEOC complaint, and Adverse Impact Compliant. This is a fancy way of saying that you can demonstrate and prove your unique strengths based on science. Together, we develop your unique Personal Power Profile – we do not evaluate your personality. Your Personal Power Profile will differentiate you from your colleagues and competition, who only show their technical skills.

When I work with an executive, I don’t even ask about personality. I’m a certified behavior expert, so I can understand you within one minute on the phone.

My company is called Control Your Career for a reason. I give you the tools and methodology to control your professional future. One part of this is helping you to realize and demonstrate your unique leadership strengths so you can easily talk about:

• Increasing revenue

• Solving a big problem

• Influencing an important decision

• Improving team productivity

• Improving compliance

• Using data to fix something

Another part that I don’t understand about my colleague's quote is that everyone in the C-Suite (or a Director or a Vice President) probably has similar “academic, technical, and professional skills” because the work at that level is more about vision and mission and overall organizational growth. At the executive leadership level, most resumes include similar professional skills like “revenue growth” and “strategy” and “partnerships.” How do you make it clear that you’re the right leader if everyone has basically the same skills? By using a scientific method like DISC to demonstrate how your unique brand of leadership improved other companies. That’s not a hard/technical and yet it’s crucial for landing the job.

So, yes, I’m a bit baffled by my colleague’s statements. And I replied as such. Yes, companies search for the hard skills, so of course you have to have hard/technical/professional skills on the resume. But it’s the soft skills, which are NOT personality descriptors, that help land you the job. 99% of resumes don’t include soft skills. So you can be in the 1% to stand out and land the job.

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Better job. More pay. More control.

For a free resume review, please contact us at Control Your Career!