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The skills section of your resume shows employers you have the abilities required to succeed in the role you’ve applied for. Often, employers pay special attention to this section to determine if you should move on to the next step of the hiring process.

In this article, we discuss the 10 top skills to include on a resume, take a look at specific skill sets for different roles and provide an FAQ on frequently asked questions about skills and resumes, such as how many should you include.

Related: Resume Writing 101: Tips for Creating a Resume

10 of the best skills to put on a resume

While you can often easily determine hard skills to list based on details in a job description, selecting relevant soft skills isn’t always as apparent. To help narrow down which soft skills to put on a resume, review the various duties of the position and determine which of your personal strengths will help you successfully complete those tasks.

Here are 10 examples of the best resume skills employers may be seeking:

1. Active listening skills

Active listening refers to the ability to focus completely on the person who you’re communicating with. Active listening helps you to understand their message, comprehend the information and respond thoughtfully. Active listeners use verbal and nonverbal techniques to show their attention to a conversation partner. Developing and using active listening skills can show colleagues you’re engaged and have an interest in the project or task at hand.

Related: 11 Active Listening Skills To Practice

2. Communication skills

Communication skills are the abilities you use when giving and receiving different kinds of information. Some examples include communicating ideas, feelings or what’s happening around you. Communication skills involve listening, talking, observing and empathizing. Having strong communication skills is important in every industry at every career level.

Read more: Top 10 Communication Skills for Career Success

3. Computer skills

Computer skills involve the ability to learn and operate various technology. Hardware skills allow you to physically operate a computer, and this can be as simple as knowing how to switch devices on and off. Software skills help you to efficiently use computer programs and applications. There are some software skills employers may consider prerequisites to employment, like using spreadsheets or knowing a certain coding language.

Read more: Basic Computer Skills: How To List Them on Your Resume

4. Customer service skills

Customer service skills are traits and practices that help you address customer needs to create a positive experience for them. Customer service skills, in general, rely heavily on problem-solving and on communication. Customer service is often considered a “soft skill.”

Related: 101 Soft Skill Interview Questions To Prepare For

5. Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal skills are the personality traits you rely on when you interact and communicate with others. They cover a variety of scenarios where cooperation is essential. Developing interpersonal skills is important to work efficiently with others, solve problems and lead projects or teams.

Read more: Interpersonal Intelligence: Meaning and Why It’s Important

6. Leadership skills

Leadership skills allow leaders to organize a group of individuals to reach a shared goal. Whether you’re in a management position or leading a project, leadership skills require you to motivate others to complete tasks and reach milestones—often according to a schedule.

If you want to tackle your employee turnover rate, make it easy for workers to stay. These 24 effective retention

When workers leave your organization, it’s not just the loss of a team member. It can be expensive to replace them and can hurt the morale of your employees. A high turnover can also impact productivity as you work to replace an extra set of hands.

So let’s take a look at some field-tested employee retention strategies. These ideas address the most common reasons workers leave. They help you create a work environment where people want to stay.

Send out surveys

If you’re not sure where to start, begin with metrics. Find out what is making your workers consider leaving. Ask what workers are struggling with in the workplace and what would make them stay.

Surveys are only the first step. Once you’ve gotten feedback, create an action list. If you’re hearing that workers are frustrated by one part of your organization, work on changing that. If employees are overworked—for example—you may need to hire more staff or even temps to give your team a break.

Follow up to make sure the change happens. You might want to make surveys a regular part of your operations, as they can help you address problems before they cause someone to quit. They also let you evaluate any initiatives you launch to encourage workers to stay.

Conduct exit interviews

An often-overlooked employee retention strategy is to ask each departing employee why they’re leaving. Once they’ve made up their mind, they may not have much to lose. They may be willing to be honest with you about the problems they’ve faced.

Chances are, others may have some of the same challenges. Fixing the problems you hear about can keep other workers from leaving.

Ask workers who are leaving to explain their decisions. You may find that employees are leaving to pursue better opportunities. They may be leaving because work no longer fits their current circumstances. Either way, you can get a sense of what you may need to change.

Update your onboarding process

Set your workers up for success from their first day. A strong onboarding and training process helps make your team members feel part of the organization right away. It also gives them the information they need to jump into work.

When creating an onboarding process, here are some things you may want to focus on.

It’s no secret that the job market is becoming more and more competitive for organizations seeking new talent. More positions are opening than there are qualified applicants to fill, and stellar candidates often have multiple offers to consider.

If you drag your feet during the hiring process, your organization will lose out on the best and brightest employees. The swifter competition will have already scooped them up. In fact, 35 percent of CEOs identified an inefficient recruiting and interview process as one of the top concerns for their organizations.

On the other hand, you don’t want to race through the recruiting process without fully screening candidates or managing their expectations. It’s important to move quickly, but speed will do you no good if a bad hire ends up costing your company more time and money than the hiring process itself.

It’s all about finding that sweet spot between agility and quality. Here’s how:

#1. Write Better Job Descriptions

The best way to change your process is to start at the beginning: how you’re talking about the open position. The purpose of a job description isn’t just to tell people about the job you have available; its true purpose is to attract the right candidates and set the right expectations about the position and your company.

When a position needs filling, hiring managers are often too stressed about finding a candidate to slow down and think about what kind of candidate they really want and need. In the interest of time, they may not spend enough time developing an effective job description, and the result is either a flood of unqualified candidates or a trickle of candidates who can meet super-specific demands. As an HR professional, you can help improve the quality of applicants by having a candid conversation with the hiring manager about what the job description should say.

Write a job description that does the screening for you.

Here’s what you should consider as you generate a job description with the hiring manager:

• What are the 5 core skills that a person needs for this job?
• What will this person spend most of their time doing?
• What tasks can they learn after being hired?
• How will the company measure success for this position?
• How much experience does this person need?

By creating a job description that gives an accurate reflection of the position along with preferred and critical qualifications, you cut out a massive amount of time you might otherwise spend screening (and you avoid hunting for a purple squirrel). The description does the screening for you so your funnel of candidates is narrowed right from the start.

#2. Eliminate Unnecessary Steps in Your Hiring Process Timeline

The more unnecessary steps you can cut out of the process, the more time you’ll save and the more likely you’ll be to beat the competition for the best candidates. A quick, easy hiring process is as important to candidates as it is to those doing the hiring.

According to a 2016 Talent Board research report, 17 percent of all candidates who reported having a negative experience with an organization’s recruiting process withdrew their applications because the process took too long.