Soft skills can be overlooked while marketing yourself, but they’re extremely important in addition to your hard skills. It can be difficult to know exactly how to put these skills into words, but we’re here to help! Read on to discover how you can better market your soft skills across all your business channels.
Step 1: Know Which Skills Are Most Important for Your Industry
Adaptability, conflict resolution, problem-solving, teamwork—the list of marketable soft skills for creatives is long and won’t apply to everyone in every job scenario. You will want to be looking closely at descriptions for your dream job, as well as much-needed skills that thought leaders in your field preach on constantly. Don’t hesitate to use AI, too, if you need help in finding the right keywords for your industry’s needs. For example, if you want to be an art director, you may notice that key skills involve leading teams, communicating concepts, staying ahead of trends and solving problems for clients on the fly. You know these are the main areas you’ll need to focus on while marketing yourself.
Step 2: Know Which Skills Are Your Strongest
We’re not all the best at everything. There will likely be soft skills that you know you need to work on. We’ll label those soft skills you’re looking to strengthen—and maybe don’t mention any issues with them in your interviews. Instead, you’ll want to focus on your strongest soft skills, prioritizing the ones that are most needed and which combination of skills can make you the most competitive. For example, if you’re a project designer and know that your style of conflict resolution and adaptability are in immediate demand at desirable companies, focus on speaking your expertise in those areas.
Once you’ve narrowed down which skills make you the most competitive and feel confident in your abilities, you’re ready to market them…
Via Your Portfolios
- Case Studies should do a lot of heavy lifting of your soft skills—it’s one of the main reasons it’s so important to mention them! Write about your work processes with these soft skill keywords and actions in mind. Stumped? Your source material is the job description, so lean on the skills that companies desire most. Make a list of skills to cover and check them off as you write your case studies for your portfolio. You can find sample creative job descriptions here.
- Your “About Me” can provide interested clients with a snapshot of your strongest skills while telling them how these skills contribute to your work. For example, if you’re a copywriter wanting to sell clients on your problem-solving skills, mention how you enjoy crafting 360 campaigns with teams, even on tight timelines. Boom! Keep your language casual while nodding to what you do best.
Via Your Resume and Cover Letter
- Your resume or CV are similar to your case studies in that you have a handful of soft skills to cover. But here you’ll want to spread your best soft skills throughout your recent experience, paying attention to how you developed these skills over time with metrics to prove them. Don’t have metrics? We have an article on how to find and use them.
- Cover letters should be tailored to the job description at hand. You can still create a template but switch out these experiential sentences depending on the highest needs of the job. Again, the list of soft skills can always be found in the job description as well as any intel you can gather from employed peers at the company. Feel free to borrow language about your skills from your case studies and rewrite them to flow nicely in your cover letter.
Via Communication
- Email is the most important place to show off your soft skills because it will likely be your first point of contact, instantly conveying how you communicate with team members. You can show how you problem-solve, ask questions, lead conversations, and collaborate without even talking about past experiences! Make sure your emails are prompt, courteous, and supply all requested info and you’ll likely be ahead of any competition who aren’t as strong at their written communication. Need help? It’s always a great idea to bounce your drafted emails off of a trusted friend, partner, or colleague before sending them.
- Social media of course needs to showcase your work, but the words in your posts are just as important. If you can turn posts into mini case studies for projects or offer your expertise in how you would handle certain situations, these are green flags for recruiters and hiring managers. Both situations provide examples of how you work and how you speak about your work. Plus, these posts prepare you for interviews while offering entertaining conversation starters for when you meet the team.
- Interviews are the final place to bring all of your soft skill work to the forefront of the conversation. Clients will have already seen your work—now they want to know what you can bring to the team. While preparing for interviews, look into their culture, their recent work, and ask questions of current employees to get a sense of what areas might need your help. Refer back to your list of strengths and industry needs and pivot towards them while answering questions.
One of the best people who can help you recognize your own greatness as well as tell you what’s needed most in your industry is a recruiter. Reach out today and see how you can turn those soft skills into your future job.