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How to write a good resume skills section for Salesforce professionals

/ Salesforce Resume/CV / By

Introduction

When creating an effective resume, you need to know how to write a skills section because it is one of the first things a potential employer will look for to get a basic understanding of what you, as a potential employee, can bring to their company. Your skills section is the part of your resume where you list the skills and abilities you have that are necessary for the job you want.

On the first glance, this part of your resume might seem quite uncomplicated. After all, you probably know of at least some of your skills and abilities. In the end, listing them on a resume is relatively easy.

But then again, as soon as you get to the part of writing, you’re going to run into a pile of practical questions that require a bit of research.

Why do I need a skills section on my resume? Which skills should I include? Are there any skills I should omit? What if I don’t have any skills relevant for the job?

The following guide includes the reasons why you should include the skill section in your Salesforce resume, different types of skills and tips for how to write a skills section for a winning resume and of course examples of good skills to include on a resume to help you make the most out of your resume and land your dream job.

Why do you need a skills section on your Salesforce resume?

Why do you need a skill section in your Salesforce resume? As you might already know, most recruiters only need a few seconds to decide whether a resume is worth reading in full. That means you only have a few seconds to get the most important, most impressive points across. Otherwise your resume ends up in the heaps of hundreds of resumes and never gets touched.

With that in mind, having an entire section designated to your skills makes a lot of sense. After all, it’s through your skills that you can be useful to a company. By devoting an entire section to them you help the employer quickly assess if you can bring something to the table.

A large majority of your skills are already shown in the work experience section of your resume, the skills section will always be a bit redundant. Don’t worry about that, it’s still worth it even if it comes at the cost of little redundancy.

What types of skills do you need to include in your Salesforce Resume?

There are two types of skills important for your resume: hard and soft skills, encompassing all types of technical or social abilities that can be relevant to a working environment. Both need to shine in your skills section.

Hard skills

Hard skills refer to more technical, accumulative abilities, usually more specific to certain Salesforce positions or Salesforce industry. 

Hard skills are usually developed through taking a course or studying. This means that the candidate has either a certificate or diploma as proof of acquiring the qualification.

Hard skills can be quantified by your level of expertise in the subject or years of experience using a certain technique or program.

Soft skills

Soft skills are capabilities that are either naturally present in certain people or are developed through relations and experience more often than through official courses. These abilities are considered personal attributes which are positive for jobseekers to bring to a professional situation.

As it can be more complicated to provide quantifiable evidence for soft skills on a resume, a tip to follow would be to research professionals in the Salesforce industry or in the Salesforce position you seek or even take a look at various similar job advertisements to see the desired or emphasized soft skills mentioned.

How to make your resume skills section become outstanding?

Customize Your Resume Skills Section

Customize the skills section of your resume to match, as much as you can, the requirements listed in the job posting. The closer a match your skills are to the job requirements, the better your chances are for being selected for an interview.

Having a skills section customized to the position makes it easy for a hiring manager to pinpoint if you have a specific skill required for that position. It is also an easy way to get resume keywords onto your resume.

What’s more, many employers utilize automated applicant tracking systems (ATS) to scan candidate resumes; these systems are programmed to search for specific keywords. The more keywords your resume are customized, the more likely it is that your resume will be selected for review by human eyes.

Identify and combine your skills to what Employers want

To find out what skills employers are looking for, you can:

  • Do research on the same position
  • Read job adverts carefully
  • Learn about employability skills.

You can conduct some research on the same position, find out what skills the employers often look for in different job advertisements or skills listed in different articles of your expertise.When you read an advert or an article, list the skills it mentions. 

When you know what skills employers are looking for, compare your skills to these. Assess your ability in each skill as accurately as you can. Ask yourself if you have used this skill a little or a lot.

For each skill, write a sentence showing how you’ve used that skill. Then write a sentence showing how you could use that skill in the job you would like.

Divide skills for resume into subsections

One problem that we routinely see with senior professionals having 10+ years of experience in the Key Skills section of the resume is they don’t know how to categorize these skills.

Either it will be missing altogether, or they’ll reserve an entire page for them. The result is a big boring wall of text which might get past an ATS but which the recruiter will not spare a second on.

It helps if you can neatly divide your entire list of key skills into relevant subsections. You can also combine bullet points into a single section to better categorize skills. Here is the set of skills for resume grouped under a relevant heading, making them much easier to quickly scan for relevance:

  • Software development (php, Javascript, CSS, HTML, Ruby)
  • Data Science (R, SQL, MySQL, Excel, Modeling)
  • Project Management (Agile, Scrum, Cost Management)

Know where to put your skills section on

Even when you have the strongest key skills, they will lose their impact if they are not placed within the proper context, and in a way that makes them truly shine.

Where you place your Salesforce resume skills section also depends on whether it’s a chronological or a functional resume.

Chronological resume

In a chronological resume, the advice would be to have the Skills in resume right below the Professional Summary section (which should always be on top).

The idea is to have the recruiter look at the summary first, get a broad-level understanding of who you are as a professional, and then scan the keywords (or Key Skills) to quickly gauge your relevance and suitability to the job vacancy.

Functional resume

For functional resumes that revolve around resume skills, more than half of your resume will consist of just that. So the dilemma of where to place the resume skills section might not be that severe in this case.

You can put your Skills section underneath the Professional summary section or at the end of your resume, which is just fine.

Samples of skills section for your Salesforce resume

Sample 1: Salesforce Administrator

Salesforce skills: 

  • Salesforce CRM
  • Apex Language 
  • Apex Classes /Controllers 
  • SOQL 
  • VisualForce Pages 
  • Apex Web Services 
  • Analytic Snapshots 
  • Case Management Automation 
  • Apex Data Loader

Databases: 

  • Oracle 11g/10g/ 9i/8i, 
  • SQL Server Siebel CRM 
  • Oracle EBS

Web Technologies: 

  • HTML/XTML 
  • Java Script
  • XML 
  • AJAX 
  • CSS

Testing: 

  • Unit Testing 
  • QTP
  • Rational testing 
  • Load testing
  • And some common Automation testing tools like Win Runner, Silk Testing, Performance Testing and bug Tracking tools like JIRA.

Additional skills: 

  • Project Management
  • Database Management
  • Report Validation rules
  • Communication

Sample 2: Salesforce Developer

Web Technologies

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Angular JS
  • SOAP
  • WSDL

Salesforce Tools:

  • Force.com
  • Eclipse IDE Plug in
  • Apex Data Loader
  • Force.com Excel connector
  • Sandbox and Production

Additional skills

  • Interpersonal skills
  • Analytical skills
  • Problem solving
  • Communication

What skills I should not include in my Salesforce resume?

When adding skills to your resume, be selective and specific. Hiring managers want to know why you’re a strong candidate for the job, not everything you’ve been qualified to do for your whole working life. They also don’t want to know about all the things you can do which have nothing to do with the job for which you’re applying.

Skills That Aren’t Relevant to the Salesforce Job

Leave off any skills you have that are not related in any way to the Salesforce job. If you are applying to a number of very different jobs in the field, consider creating a unique resume for each Salesforce job type. This will help you avoid including skills that are not relevant to a position.

Skills That Everyone Should Have Already

Employers expect that you’ll be focused, have some experience (unless you’re applying for an entry-level position), and will do an excellent job if they hire you. You don’t need to spell out these basic assumptions on your resume for the employer. 

On a similar note, don’t list things like Microsoft Word, email, or web searching. Employers have an expectation that everyone knows the basics required for almost every office job in today’s workplace.

Skills You Don’t Have

This may seem obvious, but many people fluff up their skills or put skills on their resume that they don’t have.

If you don’t have any of the skills the employer is seeking, reconsider applying for the job. Don’t fabricate skills or experience just to get hired. It will come back to haunt you in the long run.

Even if you’re a quick learner, you may not have a good grasp of what you need to know if, by some chance, you do get the job. If an employer hires you and finds out you can’t do the work, you could get fired.

Conclusion

Job postings may seem similar, but every employer has a different set of skills requirements. Even when the job looks the same, each employer may be seeking something different. It’s important to tailor your skills section to showcase your qualifications for specific Salesforce jobs. Take a few minutes to tweak your skills section, so it matches the position you’re after.