Being a people person means you can interact with others, manage social situations, and handle interpersonal relationships effectively.
You need a blend of different individual abilities to be a people person. These abilities are your people skills, and they help you create meaningful connections with coworkers and be an outstanding team player.
That’s why they’re among the most valuable soft skills in any workplace.
While your technical knowledge may be important, recruiters also want to confirm how you function within a team.
As a result, job applicants with incredible interpersonal skills have an advantage during the hiring process.
Even if you have great people skills, your resume must convince the hiring manager.
This article will help you determine if you have people skills, show you how to develop them, and teach you how to include them in your resume.
Table of Contents
Who is a People Person?
As we mentioned, a people person understands how to create and maintain interpersonal connections with others.
They can socialize easily, relate with others professionally and personally, and predict behavior. They can also interact verbally and non-verbally, intercede, and influence others.
Individuals with people skills are emotionally intelligent and have an impressive level of empathy. They are approachable and can be seen as support systems and leaders.
In addition, they are great listeners, skilled in reading non-verbal cues, and understand how to manage awkward social situations.
Other Words for People Skills
People skills are also called interpersonal intelligence and social skills.
Other words such as likeability, personality, and charisma also come to mind when talking about a people person.
People Skills Categories
While people skills consist of numerous tools and attributes, they can be grouped into three categories:
- Personal effectiveness
- Interaction
- Intercession
Personal Effectiveness
Personal effectiveness describes how you make others perceive you. It refers to how you compose yourself and display your character in different situations.
It involves being able to make decisions, assert your principles and ideas, and convey integrity.
Having personal effectiveness means you’re a confident person and always make a great first impression.
Interaction
Interaction refers to how you perceive and communicate with others.
It involves your ability to identify and understand people’s boundaries, mannerisms, and cues.
Your interaction skills allow you to listen, understand, and absorb information in ways that your clients and colleagues will believe you paid attention to them. It’s no wonder communication is considered the number one soft skill for employees.
Intercession
Your intercession skills allow you to see different points of view and reconcile them. It requires empathy, patience, diplomacy, tact, and perception.
You should be able to get across to people with different ideologies and help them understand those with opposing or misunderstood views.
It also means being good at negotiating an acceptable outcome and finding common ground for people with stark differences.
Why Are People Skills Important?
People skills are essential for individuals and organizations.
Every brand needs its staff to work in harmony to produce great work. According to a study, high human skills play a significant role in any organization’s success.
Things can get tense and uncomfortable when people spend hours together, compete for promotions, and favor different personal ideas.
It takes individuals with exceptional people skills to get along while handling these social workplace pressures. Without such harmony, the workplace becomes toxic, and productivity suffers.
As a professional, your people skills help you play well with coworkers, build valuable relationships, and excel as a leader. You’ll get along with clients, intercede during conflicts, and understand people better.
Your people skills also help you excel in other aspects of your life. You can maintain a healthy social life, keep your family together, and boost your mental health.
It doesn’t end there. Having these skills as a job applicant significantly improves your chances of employment. People person skills are highly sought after, especially for roles that require leadership responsibilities and teamwork.
How to Tell Recruiters You’re a People Person on Your Resume
You don’t have to literally write people skills on your resume unless you’re using a format that outlines your hard and soft skills. Still, you can sprinkle your people skills across different resume sections.
That said, you must ensure you pass the right message across without going off-topic under each section.
We’ll show you how to mention attributes that exhibit people skills in different resume areas.
Adding Your People Skills to Your Resume Profile or Professional Summary
You can include your people skills in your career objective or professional summary if you’re applying for a job that requires those abilities. Here’s an example:
Professional Summary
Result-driven marketing expert with 7+ years of experience in the tech industry. Skilled at lead generation, brand building, and problem-solving. Engaged with prospects both in-person and virtually and negotiated successful outcomes for clients. Managed teams of marketers and efficiently delegated roles and responsibilities to successfully execute projects. Boosted the marketing team productivity at MaveCo LTD by 95% through conflict resolution and sustainable people management.
Adding Your People Skills to Your Work Experience Section
The work experience section highlights your achievements and shows your competence in different areas. In addition, you can provide factual evidence of your people skills as part of your achievements under each position.
Here’s an example:
Experience
Lead Digital Marketer – MaveCo LTD (2019-09 to 2022-02)
– Managed a team of 20 digital marketing professionals and improved team collaboration using effective team-building and communication strategies
– Organized one-to-one reach out sessions with prospects and improved conversion rate by 78%
– Introduced efficient skill-based task matching procedure to improve marketing team’s productivity by 95%
– Guided the team to achieve 100% web traffic in the first quarter of 2020
– Trained and mentored digital marketing interns in lead generation, follow-ups, and conversion
Adding Your People Skills to Your Skills Section
The skills section shows your abilities, especially those valuable to the vacancy. You can outline your people skills in the skills section and dedicate a segment to your interpersonal skills. Here’s how:
Skills
Interpersonal Skills:
– Problem-solving
– Teamwork
– Conflict resolution
– Active listening
– Effective communication
Showcasing Your People Skills in a Job Interview
If you are invited for an interview, your resume must have impressed the recruiters.
They’re trying to confirm if you are who you claim to be and check out your other qualities.
You must showcase the capabilities and skills you outlined in your resume to convince them you’re right for the job.
You want to make sure they see you as a people person the moment you walk through the door. It’s okay to feel nervous, but ensure they know that you have everything under control.
Make eye contact, exhibit confident body language, and smile.
You should also use powerful storytelling to your advantage. For example, when asked questions, give real-life instances when you encountered and solved a similar problem.
People Skills You Need to Excel
The following are skills that make you a people person. While these attributes come to some people naturally, you can build and develop them.
Check them and improve on areas where you’re currently limited.
Assertiveness
Being assertive means standing up for your point of view and expressing yourself confidently. You shouldn’t let pressure get to you or let others influence your decisions easily.
This skill can enhance your self-esteem, make others respect you more, and help you build honest relationships. It also helps reduce stress if you have to take on too many responsibilities at once.
While assertiveness comes naturally for some, you can learn this communication style. To be more assertive, believe in your worth, make sure you’ve researched talking points to ensure you’re correct and set strict boundaries and principles.
Open-Mindedness
Being assertive doesn’t mean you should dismiss other people’s ideas and points of view.
On the contrary, entertaining methods and opinions contradicting yours is a great way to connect with people, understand them, and learn from them.
Open-mindedness also helps you communicate with people better. Knowing where they’re coming from allows you to shape words in ways they understand. It’s also one of the critical skills needed for diplomacy and conflict resolution.
Active Listening
Active listening means paying attention to what others are saying to understand, not just to figure out a response.
It helps you understand a speaker, identify their behaviors, and learn how to interact with them. It also ensures you communicate civilly without unnecessary misunderstandings.
Empathy
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes and attempt to feel what they’re feeling.
This skill helps you understand others emotionally, allowing you to see things through their eyes. It builds trust, strengthens relationships, creates lasting connections, and increases cooperation.
To build empathy, learn to listen to others carefully, put yourself in their situation, and focus on finding solutions.
Self-Confidence
Being self-confident means believing in yourself and trusting your abilities. Showing this skill allows your clients and colleagues to trust your abilities.
If you can’t show self-confidence, people won’t see you as reliable, regardless of your technical skills.
To exude confidence, make sure you talk yourself up with a powerful voice, especially when it comes to the things you’re good at.
Honesty
You can’t build lasting connections without telling the truth. A track record of honesty ensures your colleagues and clients can see you as a genuine person and trust and rely on your words.
To build and maintain healthy, honest relationships, ensure you provide accurate information to colleagues, and admit when you’ve made mistakes. You should also engage in constructive criticism and present the correct facts.
With clients, only make promises you can deliver and be transparent about your process every step of the way.
Decoding Emotions
Decoding people’s emotions involves having a high sense of empathy and intuition and knowing how to read body language and non-verbal cues.
This type of perception requires a good level of emotional and social intelligence.
Humans are complex beings, so you must learn the different things that make each person tick to understand them fully.
So, to develop your perception skills, make sure you listen to understand, gather information about each person’s position and preferences, and focus on non-verbal cues.
Patience
Being patient means you’re level-headed and not in a rush to make decisions.
Sometimes, you have to settle down until all the facts come in, review them, then propose an action.
Collaboration
Your collaboration skills allow you to work well and get along with others in any workplace.
Every successful organization is built on solid teamwork, and being able to collaborate is a critical people skill.
To be a team player, you must listen to others, interact effectively, and understand their positions. You must also exhibit diligence and commitment. This way, other team members will believe they can rely on you.
Influencing skills
Having influencing skills means you can convince people to willingly accept your point of view without dismissing their opinions.
If you’re sure about a particular topic, solution, or strategy, you need excellent influencing skills to bring your coworkers around and make them agree.
To influence others, you must listen, show them you understand where they are coming from, and effectively communicate why your way is better.
If you’re a leader, you should also be able to showcase admirable qualities, such as hard work and commitment, that will lead others to look up to you and trust you.
Tolerance
It’s natural for people to act out when they have a bad day.
We’ve all been in situations where we say things we don’t mean or react without thinking.
Being tolerant in these situations shows you understand what your colleagues are going through, and they will appreciate you for it.
So, try to understand what’s behind a coworker’s actions before reacting. This way, you’ll avoid making rash and heavy-handed decisions and even help out a colleague.
Conflict Resolution
Conflicts challenge teamwork and can halt work progress, especially at crucial stages.
It also makes projects more challenging and can hurt productivity. That is why employers with conflict resolution skills are sought after.
You can resolve conflicts by actively listening to both sides and finding common ground. You can also find a solution everyone agrees on to push the project forward.
Reading Body Language and Non-Verbal Cues
Understanding non-verbal cues and reading body language allows you to pick up hints about how someone perceives what you’re saying.
It also helps you understand people’s tolerance about a conversation, helping you be careful and mindful with your words and letting you know when to end a discussion.
Negotiation
From asking for deadline extensions to client meetings and interactions with coworkers, you’ll have to negotiate with people throughout your career.
Negotiation involves finding the right balance between you and the other party and achieving win-win situations. As fun as it sounds, it requires great skill.
To be a good negotiator, you must arm yourself with facts, practice, understand the other party, and believe in yourself and your position. You must also confirm what you’re willing to let go of and the minimum you can accept.
Delegating Skills
Delegation is a critical management skill. You must know how and when to share your team’s workload.
This involves understanding each team member’s capacity and assigning suitable tasks tailored to each individual’s abilities. You must also know how to convince your subordinates that those tasks are right for them.
Problem-Solving
Problem-solving is another characteristic of a person with people skills. You must always seek out solutions when faced with issues and challenges. Solution-finding triggers communication and collaboration and keeps people focused on things that matter.
Messaging
Being assertive and confident means you can stand your ground on what you believe. However, you still need to come across as likable to be a people person.
As a result, you need the right messaging to bring people around while standing firm on your position. Otherwise, you could come off as rude and condescending.
So, ensure you understand your audience by listening to them first so you know the right words to use.
Humor
You should be able to throw in jokes during conversations and light up the room with laughter.
It’s also vital that you understand humor, especially banter. This way, you’re not annoyed by statements intended to be funny.
Networking Skills
Your networking skills are needed to advance your career in any field. Therefore, you should build professional relationships with those in your industry and organization. This way, you’re able to call in favors and help others.
Positivity
Exhibiting a positive attitude means you’re always looking on the bright side and seeking solutions in dire circumstances. You must always use reassuring words to motivate others and raise their spirits.
Conclusion
Your people skills will give you an advantage in interviews and help you excel at your job. So, make sure you’re constantly improving these skills every step of the way. Take note of mistakes and ensure you remember every lesson.