5 Ways to Highlight Your Leadership Skills on Your Resume
Strong leadership skills are a hot commodity — adept leaders make things happen, promote and enhance a company’s vision, and elevate the performance of everyone they work with. Emphasizing your leadership abilities on your resume can help potential employers see the value you’d bring to their enterprise, and ultimately, make you a more attractive candidate.
A slick, well-organized resume is the first step to upping your profile as a leader, so choose a fresh template, and get ready to dive into the content.
Job searching can be draining, trying to get one of the highest paying jobs or even getting that interview, but you may be missing out on opportunities to craft each section of your resume so it reflects essential leadership skills, making it stand out among a sea of applications from similarly-experienced candidates.
Emphasizing crucial skills such as making tough decisions under pressure, guiding colleagues, or coming up with innovative ideas that shape the direction of projects can help propel your resume to the top of a company’s interview list. Below, we’ll go through 5 great ways to highlight leadership on your resume for maximum impact.
1. Include examples of coaching and mentorship
Experience in coaching or mentoring can make you more attractive to hiring managers because it shows your ability to enhance the performance of those around you.
As a starting point, note whether the job description uses specific mentorship-related keywords, such as ‘guide’ or ‘support.’ Mirroring the job description by incorporating these keywords into your resume summary or experience bullet points is a great move because it shows you have the exact skills they’re looking for and optimizes your resume for ATS software.
Then, add a few specific examples of coaching that demonstrate the impact of your mentorship. If you have metrics displaying results such as reduced employee turnover or improved employee satisfaction, now’s the time to mention them.
You can also outline positive outcomes for individuals to demonstrate your impact, such as your mentee receiving a promotion or meeting more KPIs.
2. Highlight the outcome of your projects or teams
Including measurable outcomes in your resume shows hiring managers that you don’t just lead — you lead effectively. Potential employers want to gauge the impact of your leadership on your company’s performance, so backing up your experience with hard data can help employers visualize your impact.
Examples of metrics to include in the experience or achievements sections of your resume include:
- Increases in revenue, profit, or sales
- Measurable improvements in team productivity
- Enhanced employee or client satisfaction ratings
- Improved employee retention
- Time or resources saved as a result of streamlined workflows or processes
Even if you don’t have much hard data to work with, you can still use the examples above to guide you in making your resume’s experience section more results-focused so hiring managers can see your successes, not just your experiences.
3. Emphasize effective collaboration
A recent report on HR statistics found that effective teamwork and communication are two of the biggest skill gaps applicants struggle to match. While this applies to any role, effective collaboration is an especially appealing quality in a leader because it’s vital to ensuring team unity, performance, and productivity.
Managers must be able to delegate tasks effectively to ensure roles are clear and prevent workflow bottlenecks. If you have a good example of how your communication skills have improved your team’s ability to collaborate effectively, be sure to include it in the experience section of your resume.
Describe positive results after giving constructive feedback so potential employers can envision how you’ll ensure your colleagues’ growth and development. It could also be worth giving an example of how you’ve acted on feedback you received to demonstrate your ability to reflect and adapt.
4. Show you can lead a team or project remotely
According to McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, over half of American workers are working remotely for at least part of the week. Remote leadership skills are in high demand as companies support their employees in maintaining a healthy work-life balance and ensure deliverables are met by a scattered workforce.
Demonstrating remote work skills and experience shows hiring managers you can help their company overcome these hurdles, particularly if you have experience managing a team or project in a remote setting. Even online part-time jobs like a virtual assistant or copywriter help you develop necessary skills to lead remotely.
Describe any strategies you’ve successfully employed to manage issues such as scheduling, employee development, or task management in your experience bullet points and include any quantifiable positive impacts.
5. Demonstrate your problem-solving skills
Problem-solving skills are an essential part of any successful leader’s toolkit because they allow you to identify and troubleshoot issues early, from less significant snags causing inefficiency to major problems threatening entire projects.
Providing examples of changes you’ve made to address a problem and their positive impact offers employers a clearer idea of your abilities than simply listing ‘problem-solving’ in your resume’s skills section. For example, you could add a bullet to your experience section outlining how you streamlined a key process and what difference it made to your team’s time management or productivity.
If you’re unsure where to start, abilities such as organization, effective planning, and critical analysis are strong examples of skills necessary for problem-solving and risk management.
Key Takeaway
Creating a leadership-focused resume involves more than simply listing your experience as a manager. Providing examples of how you applied leadership skills, adding performance metrics to experience bullet points, and enhancing your resume summary and skills section with the right keywords can help you communicate your career story more effectively and paint a compelling picture for potential employers.
By: Emily Crowley is a Senior Content Writer and Resume Expert at Resume Genius, where she loves helping job seekers overcome obstacles and advance their careers. She graduated from George Mason University with a degree in Foreign Language and Culture.
(The opinions and views of guest contributions are not necessarily those of theglasshammer.com).
