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Create ResumeSoft skills on a CV should not be a random list of nice personality traits. They should show how you work, communicate, solve problems, handle pressure, support colleagues, and make decisions in real workplace situations. In the UK job market, recruiters and hiring managers do not usually shortlist someone because they wrote “team player” or “excellent communicator”. They shortlist when the CV gives evidence that those skills helped the candidate deliver results, work with difficult stakeholders, improve a process, support customers, manage priorities, or keep things moving when work became messy.
The best CV soft skills examples are specific, believable, and connected to the role. Your CV should not tell me you have soft skills. It should make me see them.
Soft skills are the behavioural and interpersonal skills that affect how you work with people, tasks, pressure, feedback, change, and responsibility. They include communication, teamwork, adaptability, leadership, problem solving, emotional intelligence, organisation, resilience, stakeholder management, conflict resolution, and decision making.
That is the textbook version. Useful, but a bit polite.
In hiring reality, soft skills answer a more practical question:
Can this person do the job without creating avoidable friction, confusion, extra management work, or chaos?
That is what employers are quietly assessing.
A hiring manager is not reading your CV thinking, “How lovely, this person is empathetic.” They are thinking:
Can they deal with customers without escalating every minor issue?
Can they work with colleagues who are not always easy?
Can they explain things clearly without making everyone chase them?
Can they manage competing priorities without falling apart?
The best soft skills for your CV depend on the job, seniority level, industry, and type of employer. A graduate CV needs different evidence from a senior operations manager CV. A customer service CV needs different soft skills from a software engineer CV. Still, some soft skills appear again and again in UK job descriptions because they affect performance in almost every role.
Communication is one of the most overused soft skills on CVs, but it is also one of the most important. The mistake is writing “excellent communication skills” and leaving it there. That tells me nothing.
Good communication on a CV should show who you communicated with, why it mattered, and what improved because of it.
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Why this works: it shows audience awareness. That matters because workplace communication is rarely about speaking nicely. It is about making information usable for the person receiving it.
Teamwork does not mean “I get along with people”. Most people get along with people when everything is easy. Employers care about teamwork when deadlines are tight, priorities clash, or someone has dropped the ball.
Can they take feedback without becoming defensive?
Can they be trusted with responsibility?
Can they influence people when they do not have formal authority?
This is why generic soft skills lists rarely work. They make claims, but they do not reduce doubt. A strong CV reduces doubt.
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Why this works: it shows contribution, not just friendliness. Being pleasant is nice. Being useful under pressure is hireable.
Problem solving is valuable when it shows judgement. Many candidates write that they are “natural problem solvers”, which sounds good until the CV gives no actual problem.
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Why this works: it shows that you do not just notice problems. You do something constructive with them.
Adaptability has become more important in UK hiring because many workplaces are dealing with changing systems, leaner teams, hybrid working, restructuring, and shifting commercial priorities. But again, do not simply write “adaptable”.
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Why this works: it shows you can handle change without needing everything to be perfect before you act.
Organisation is not about having a tidy diary. It is about managing work so other people are not constantly chasing, correcting, or rescuing you.
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Why this works: it shows reliability. In hiring, reliability is underrated because everyone claims it, but not everyone demonstrates it.
Leadership is not only for managers. You can show leadership by taking ownership, influencing others, improving standards, mentoring colleagues, or guiding work without having a formal title.
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Why this works: it shows that people trusted you to guide something. That is stronger than writing “strong leadership skills”.
Emotional intelligence is difficult to write well because it can easily sound vague or self flattering. The best way to show it is through situations involving customers, conflict, feedback, change, or sensitive conversations.
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Why this works: it shows maturity. Employers do not want drama disguised as passion. They want someone who can read the room and behave professionally.
Stakeholder management is a strong soft skill for professional, corporate, project, operations, HR, finance, technology, marketing, and management roles. It means you can work with people who have different priorities, pressures, and levels of influence.
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Why this works: it shows commercial awareness and relationship management. In many roles, the work is not difficult because of the task itself. It is difficult because people have different agendas.
Resilience is another soft skill that candidates often write badly. Avoid dramatic phrases like “thrives under pressure” unless you can prove it. Recruiters have seen that phrase so many times it has almost become wallpaper.
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Why this works: it shows composure. Employers are not looking for a hero. They are looking for someone who remains useful when things become inconvenient.
Soft skills should be written through evidence. That evidence can appear in your professional profile, key skills section, work experience, achievements, or role descriptions. The strongest place is usually your work experience section because it connects the skill to real activity.
A simple structure works well:
Soft skill plus situation plus action plus outcome.
For example:
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The good version works because it answers the questions a recruiter is actually asking:
Who did you communicate with?
What was the purpose?
Was there pressure, complexity, or responsibility?
Did your communication help something move forward?
You do not need every bullet point to include a metric. That is another piece of CV advice that has become slightly obsessive. Metrics are useful when they are real and relevant, but forced numbers can look suspicious. Sometimes the value is not “improved by 37 percent”. Sometimes the value is that you handled complex customers, reduced confusion, supported a team, protected service quality, or kept a process moving.
That still matters.
The right soft skills examples depend on the role. A recruiter screening CVs is looking for relevance, not a personality inventory.
Customer service roles need communication, patience, resilience, problem solving, active listening, and conflict resolution. The best CVs show that the candidate can deal with real customers, not just friendly ones.
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Recruiter view: customer service hiring managers often look for emotional control. They want someone who will not take every complaint personally or pass every difficult customer to a manager within three minutes.
Administrative roles need organisation, attention to detail, communication, prioritisation, discretion, and reliability. These roles often look simple from the outside, but good administrators quietly prevent operational mess.
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Recruiter view: for admin roles, soft skills are often assessed through signs of dependability. If the CV is messy, vague, or full of unexplained gaps, it works against the very skills the candidate claims to have.
Sales roles need persuasion, resilience, relationship building, negotiation, confidence, listening, and commercial judgement. Strong sales CVs do not only shout about targets. They show how the candidate works with prospects and clients.
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Recruiter view: hiring managers can usually tell the difference between confident and careless. The best sales CVs show discipline as well as personality.
Management CVs need leadership, decision making, coaching, communication, accountability, conflict resolution, and change management. At this level, soft skills should show impact through people and performance.
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Recruiter view: a manager who only says they are a “people person” worries me. Management is not just being liked. It is setting expectations, making decisions, giving feedback, and staying fair when things are awkward.
Graduate CVs often have less professional experience, so soft skills can come from university projects, part time jobs, internships, volunteering, societies, or personal projects.
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Recruiter view: graduates often underestimate part time work. Retail, hospitality, tutoring, care work, volunteering, and society roles can show strong soft skills if written properly. Do not dismiss them because they were not “corporate”.
Technology roles still need soft skills. In fact, they often matter more than candidates realise, especially for roles involving stakeholders, agile teams, product managers, clients, or users.
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Recruiter view: technical skill gets you considered. Communication often gets you hired. Hiring managers are cautious with technically strong candidates who cannot explain, collaborate, or handle feedback.
Soft skills can appear in several places on your CV, but they should not all be dumped into one generic skills section.
Your profile can include one or two important soft skills, but only if they are relevant to the role.
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Customer focused administrator with experience managing busy inboxes, coordinating internal documents, and supporting teams with clear communication and strong attention to detail.
This works because the soft skills are connected to the job function.
A key skills section can include soft skills, but keep them specific. Avoid a long list of personality words.
Better soft skills for a key skills section include:
Stakeholder communication
Complaint handling
Team coordination
Conflict resolution
Diary management
Client relationship building
Workload prioritisation
Cross functional collaboration
Coaching and mentoring
Change communication
These are stronger than vague phrases like hardworking, motivated, friendly, passionate, and enthusiastic. Those words may be true, but they are weak evidence.
This is usually the best place to prove soft skills because you can show them in context.
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That one bullet shows communication, organisation, problem solving, ownership, and customer focus without listing them all separately. That is how good CV writing works. It lets the reader infer strength from evidence.
If your soft skills helped create a measurable or visible result, include them in achievements.
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This shows initiative, communication, organisation, and supportiveness. It also tells me the candidate improves things rather than simply performs tasks.
Many CVs fail because the candidate writes soft skills as labels instead of evidence. Here are common weak examples and stronger alternatives.
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The good examples are not longer for the sake of it. They are better because they provide context. A recruiter does not need poetry. We need proof.
A CV that lists 15 soft skills often feels less convincing than one that proves five properly. When candidates include every positive trait they can think of, the CV starts sounding like a dating profile for employment. Lovely in theory, not very useful in screening.
Choose the soft skills that match the job advert and prove them through your experience.
Words like friendly, loyal, kind, bubbly, and honest might be positive, but they are not usually strong CV skills. Employers care about how those traits translate into work.
Instead of “friendly”, show customer communication.
Instead of “honest”, show accountability.
Instead of “bubbly”, show relationship building.
Instead of “loyal”, show reliability and long term contribution.
If your CV says you have excellent attention to detail but contains spelling errors, inconsistent dates, and poor formatting, the CV has already argued against you. Fair? Maybe harsh. Real? Absolutely.
The same applies to communication. If your CV is confusing, vague, or full of empty phrases, it does not prove strong communication.
For a project coordinator role, stakeholder communication and organisation matter. For a care role, empathy, patience, and safeguarding awareness matter. For a sales role, persuasion, resilience, and relationship building matter.
Soft skills are not equally valuable in every role. Relevance is what makes them powerful.
Avoid phrases that sound impressive but mean very little.
Weak phrases include:
Exceptional interpersonal abilities
Dynamic team player
Results driven communicator
Natural leader
Highly motivated individual
Works well independently and as part of a team
That last one appears on so many CVs it should probably have its own pension plan.
Use plain language. It is more credible.
Recruiters do not assess soft skills only by reading the skills section. We look for signals across the whole CV.
Those signals include:
The way your achievements are written
The level of responsibility you have handled
The type of people you have worked with
Whether your role involved customers, stakeholders, suppliers, managers, or team members
Whether you improved anything
Whether you handled pressure, change, conflict, or complexity
Whether your CV is clear, structured, and consistent
Hiring managers then test those soft skills at interview. This is where vague CV claims can create problems. If you write “strong conflict resolution skills”, be ready to explain a real situation. If you write “leadership”, be ready to discuss how you influenced, supported, coached, or challenged people.
In UK interviews, soft skills are often tested through competency questions such as:
Tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult customer.
Give an example of when you had to manage competing priorities.
Describe a time you worked with a challenging stakeholder.
Tell me about a time you received feedback.
Give an example of when you solved a problem at work.
Your CV should prepare the ground for those conversations. It should give enough evidence to earn the interview, but not so much that it becomes a long essay.
Do not use the same soft skills for every CV. That is one of the fastest ways to make a CV feel untailored.
Start with the job advert. Look for behavioural clues, not just obvious skill words.
If the advert says the role is “fast paced”, they probably want prioritisation, resilience, and adaptability.
If it says “working with multiple stakeholders”, they want communication, relationship management, and influencing skills.
If it says “customer focused”, they want empathy, listening, complaint handling, and professionalism.
If it says “able to work independently”, they want ownership, judgement, and reliability.
If it says “collaborative team environment”, they want teamwork, communication, and low ego behaviour.
That last one matters. Employers rarely write “please do not bring unnecessary drama into the team”, but sometimes that is exactly what they mean.
Once you identify the soft skills behind the job advert, choose evidence from your experience that matches. You do not need to rewrite your entire CV for every application, but you should adjust the emphasis.
A practical approach:
Choose three to five soft skills that genuinely matter for the role.
Prove them through work experience bullet points.
Mirror the employer’s language naturally, without copying the advert word for word.
Remove soft skills that are not relevant to this specific application.
Make sure your examples match the seniority of the role.
For junior roles, employers may accept examples from education, volunteering, retail, hospitality, care, internships, or part time work.
For senior roles, soft skills need to show judgement, influence, accountability, leadership, stakeholder confidence, and commercial awareness.
Before sending your CV for a UK job application, review your soft skills with a recruiter’s eye.
Ask yourself:
Have I proved my soft skills instead of simply listing them?
Are the soft skills relevant to this specific job?
Have I shown who I worked with and what I helped achieve?
Have I avoided vague phrases like “team player” and “excellent communicator”?
Does my work experience support the skills I claim in my profile?
Is my CV itself clear enough to prove communication and attention to detail?
Could I confidently explain each soft skill example at interview?
Have I used plain, professional UK English?
Have I avoided stuffing my CV with too many personality traits?
Would a hiring manager understand how these skills help me perform in the role?
The best soft skills on a CV are not decorative. They do a job. They help the recruiter understand how you behave at work, how you handle responsibility, and whether you are likely to succeed in the environment they are hiring for.
Do not write soft skills to sound nice. Write them to remove doubt.
Written by Simar Malhi, a recruiter and headhunter with international recruitment experience. I write about CVs, job applications, hiring decisions, and the reality behind recruitment processes. My goal is to help candidates understand more honestly how employers, recruiters, and hiring managers actually select candidates.
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