Regardless of the position you are applying for, showcasing leadership skills is always crucial. The challenging task though is how well you display them on your resume. 

Leadership is a combination of several different skills working together such as adaptability, delegating tasks, communication and organisation among others. It’s these skills a leader uses to organise and lead others to reach a shared goal.

Possessing leadership skills as a candidate is vital, but if you don’t describe them well on your resume, your potential employer may miss out on your key skills.

Here are some of the ways you can successfully showcase your leadership skills on the resume;

Be somewhat detailed 

According to Maureen Umuringa, a human resource manager, hiring managers are interested in candidates that explain their skills and not just jotting them down. To show that you’re a leader takes much to believe especially to the people that don’t know you. 

Include leadership-related accomplishments from a previous job, she says, adding that you should aim at giving details to make the hiring managers believe you since you’re competing with other candidates. If you led a team that organised a specific task, include the efforts and skills you set to emerge winners and so forth. However, share information that is just necessary as too much of it can easily put you off-topic. All you have to do is explain what you did and how you did it.

Focus on leadership skills mentioned in the job description

"There is a lot of excitement when applying for a job as you need to assure the hiring managers that you’re the best candidate for the position. Thus, you might end up highlighting skills that are not necessary for the job. Such unnecessary writing just makes you disorganised even when what you want is to impress. Only mention specific leadership skills from the job description and give examples to verify how you demonstrate them,” Umuringa states.

Communication skills shouldn’t miss

Umuringa further notes that you can’t talk about leadership and fail to mention communication skills, because good leaders are those that are skilled in proper communication. Some of these include; writing, speaking, presenting, listening, team building, negotiating, motivation, empathy and honesty.

Delegation

She also points out that your resume should demonstrate your delegation skills by describing how you managed a team or project. This should come with specific examples of how you delegated tasks, established expectations, followed progress, and gave feedback.

Decision-making skills

For Mike Donovan, a CEO of a procurement company, leadership goes hand-in-hand with decision-making skills. As a job seeker, you have to convince the recruitment team that you can constantly make important decisions which can have an impact on the success of your team or company.

You can include scenarios and provide effective solutions that best fit such situations. Some of the common decision-making skills could be active listening, data analysis, critical thinking, and so forth, Donovan says.

Use leadership keywords

"If you’re applying for a leadership position, it’s important to include the right terms on your resume to demonstrate your leadership capabilities. Instead of saying that you have strong leadership skills, there are a number of words you can use to show that indeed you’re a leader and some of these are; motivated, spearheaded, supported, advocated, piloted, and pioneered, among others. With these, prospective employers would be interested to know the kind of leader you are,” he states.