The skills section is where most CVs either gain ground or lose it quietly. It's one of the first places a recruiter scans, one of the key targets for ATS keyword matching, and also the section most commonly filled with content that adds no value whatsoever.

Here's how to get it right.

The Hard Truth About Soft Skills
"Team player. Excellent communicator. Results-driven professional." You've seen these phrases. You've probably written them. They need to go.

Recruiters don't actively search for soft skills in ATS systems. They expect soft skills to be demonstrated through the evidence in your work experience, not stated explicitly. "Leadership skills" tells a recruiter nothing. "Led a team of 12 across two departments, delivering a £2m project under budget" tells them everything they need to know about your leadership.

Your dedicated skills section should be built around hard skills; specific, measurable, role-relevant competencies. These are what get matched against the job description and picked up by ATS filtering.

How Many Skills to Include
Analysis of over 93,000 CVs found the median number of skills listed is around 9, with most falling between 6 and 20. There's no magic number, but the principle is quality over quantity. A list of 25 skills that includes "Microsoft Word" and "good time management" is weaker than eight tightly relevant technical skills.

The skills section works best when it's backed up by your work experience. 79% of recruiters open with the work experience section, so your skills need to show up there too, not just in a dedicated list.

The Tailoring Problem
The single biggest mistake with the skills section is treating it as a fixed list that stays the same for every application.

54% of candidates don't tailor their CV to match the job description, significantly reducing their chances of progressing. For the skills section specifically, this means reading the job description carefully, identifying the skills it prioritises, and making sure those appear prominently in the same language the employer used.

If the job spec says "data analysis" and your skills section says "analytical thinking," you may be talking about the same thing but the ATS won't necessarily know that.

What to Cut
Remove anything that doesn't directly support your case for this specific role. That includes:

-Generic soft skills listed as bullet points
-Skills so basic they're assumed at your level (listing "email" or "Word" unless you're entry level)
-Anything you've listed out of habit rather than genuine relevance

If you're struggling to fill the section with relevant skills, that's usually a signal to reframe your work experience bullets to surface skills more explicitly, not to pad the skills list with filler.

Placement Matters Too
Some of your strongest skills should appear in your professional summary at the top of your CV, where a recruiter will see them immediately. Your dedicated skills section reinforces this — but the summary is where the first impression is formed.

The Right Way to List Skills
Order by relevance to the role, not alphabetically or by how proud you are of them. The most important skills for this specific job go first. If the role requires three non-negotiable technical competencies, those should be at the top of your list.

Karro analyses your CV's skills section against the role you're targeting, identifying gaps in keyword coverage and flagging terms you've used that don't match what recruiters are searching for. Try it free.
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