# Soft Skills Employers Want: The Six That Count and How to Prove Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-employers-want/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-employers-want.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The soft skills employers want most from new graduates, from problem-solving to work ethic: what each looks like at work and how to prove it on a resume. ## Key facts - Title: Soft Skills Employers Want: The Six That Count and How to Prove Them - Category: Employability - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Teamwork, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: soft skills employers want - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-employers-want/ ## What this page covers - The soft skills employers want most from new graduates, from problem-solving to work ethic: what each looks like at work and how to prove it on a resume. - Practical guidance for soft skills employers want - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation The soft skills employers want most from new graduates are problem-solving, teamwork, written and verbal communication, initiative, and work ethic. All six are among the attributes employers most often look for on a graduate's resume, according to NACE's Job Outlook 2025, and each is a set of behaviors you can practice and show, not a personality trait you either have or lack. If you have the degree and the technical basics but still wonder whether that will be enough, the list is good news: it is short, it changes little from year to year, and you have probably been building parts of it for a while. Knowing the six names is the easy part. The real question is how you prove them when every other applicant writes the same six words. ## The six soft skills employers want most When NACE asked employers what they look for on new graduates' resumes for its Job Outlook 2025, nearly 90 percent named problem-solving and nearly 80 percent named teamwork. Written communication, initiative, and work ethic each mattered to at least 70 percent, and more than two-thirds looked for verbal communication. The list makes sense once you see the employer's problem: a graduate has little work history, so the hiring decision is really a prediction of how you will behave on the job. The core of that list barely moves. LinkedIn's 2019 analysis of employer demand, reported by the World Economic Forum, put creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, and [time management](/knowledge/time-management/time-management-skills-in-the-workplace/) at the top, which covers much the same ground under different names. What you build now will not go out of date. Before the list itself, one distinction makes it far more useful: each item is a label for an outcome, not a single skill. Nobody can practice "work ethic" directly. You can practice what it is made of, and that is what each entry below spells out. ### 1. Problem-solving This is the attribute employers look for most often, and it rarely means cracking a hard puzzle on your own. At work, it looks like a sequence of ordinary moves: making sure you understand what is actually being asked before you start, checking your thinking with someone who has handled something similar, deciding with good-enough information instead of waiting for certainty, and, when you take a problem to your manager, bringing a possible solution with it. Your evidence is any time something went wrong in a project, a part-time job, or a club, and you did something about it. Employers care about the steps you took, not about how clever the fix was. ### 2. Teamwork Nearly four in five employers look for teamwork, and nearly every applicant claims it, which is why the word alone carries no information. What makes it convincing is specific behavior: doing your part of a group project when you said you would, sharing what you know instead of keeping it to yourself, giving the group the credit, and [handling a disagreement about the work](/knowledge/teamwork/how-to-disagree-respectfully/) without making it personal. Group projects, part-time jobs, sports, and volunteering all supply this kind of evidence. "I'm a team player" tells an employer nothing; a two-sentence account of how your group got past a real disagreement tells them a great deal. ### 3. Written communication At least 70 percent of employers look for written communication, and it is the one skill on the list they can check before they ever meet you. Your application email and cover letter are writing samples, read before anything you claim about yourself. The behaviors that count at work are the same ones that make an application readable: the main point in the first line, a [subject line](/knowledge/communication/business-communication-email/) that says what the message is about, short paragraphs, a final proofread, and only the recipients who need it. If your application reads cleanly, you have already shown the skill instead of asserting it. ### 4. Verbal communication More than two-thirds of employers look for verbal communication, and the interview is where they see it live. Here the skill is less about polish than about listening: hearing the whole question, answering the question that was asked rather than the one you prepared for, stating your main point first, and stopping once you have made it. Arriving on time and giving the interviewer your full attention are part of the same signal. Explaining your own work out loud is a different skill from writing about it, so say your examples aloud a few times before you need them. ### 5. Initiative At least 70 percent of employers look for initiative, and at entry level it is mostly small and visible: volunteering for a task nobody has claimed, proposing a modest improvement to how something is done, or asking for more responsibility once you are reliably delivering the basics. Employers value it for a practical reason. A new hire who waits to be told every next step costs supervision time; one who spots the next step saves it. Student life offers openings for this all the time, in clubs, group projects, and part-time jobs, and a small act of initiative can change how people see you. > In my position, I get to try things out and play around with a lot of different things. For example, I took the initiative to become a 'lean manager' — entirely on my own initiative — and now people come to me and ask about it. > > Here, it's great to ask questions and come up with suggestions for improvement. That is how one of the young people we interviewed about starting work described it to us, as we noted it down rather than word for word. Nobody handed her that role; she took on a small area by herself, and it made her the person colleagues come to with questions. ### 6. Work ethic At least 70 percent of employers look for work ethic, and in practice it means reliability: being on time, meeting deadlines without reminders, and doing what you said you would do. Behind it sits time management. When you take on a task, pin down exactly when it is due rather than accepting "as soon as possible," estimate the time realistically with some buffer, and check in early if a deadline starts to slip. A part-time job held alongside your studies is strong evidence here, because it shows you kept commitments to two sets of people at once. ## How to tell which soft skills you already have The quickest honest check is to go through the six and, for each one, try to name a specific situation where you did the behaviors described. Not "I'm organized," but a real week, a real deadline, a real group. Where a situation comes to mind easily, you have evidence. Where nothing comes, you have found a gap, and a gap in these skills is something not yet learned, not a verdict on who you are. Gaps close through deliberate practice in real settings, such as a part-time job, an internship, group work, or volunteering, especially when someone tells you how your behavior lands. Your own view has limits, though, because how you come across to others is the part of yourself you see least clearly. Ask someone who has worked alongside you, such as a group-project partner or a shift supervisor, which of the six they would vouch for, and ask for one specific example. For an outside read to set beside theirs and your own, you can [map your strengths and gaps](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) across your workplace skills. That is worth knowing before you decide what your application leads with. ## How to prove soft skills on a resume and in an interview NACE's advice to students is to show these attributes on the resume backed by real experience from classwork, campus activities, and internships, so that each one can be expanded on in the interview. The logic is simple. A listed skill is a claim, and an employer cannot check a claim. A described situation is evidence, and evidence can be probed. When every applicant uses the same six words, the example is what separates you. On the resume, that means [turning labels into actions and results](/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-to-write-in-cv/). "Strong teamwork skills" becomes a line about the group project you coordinated and what it delivered; "excellent communicator" becomes the weekly update you wrote for a student organization and who relied on it. One concrete line per skill is enough, as long as you can tell the full story behind it. In the interview, the full story is what you will be asked for. Interviewers typically test soft skills with behavioral questions ("Tell me about a time when…"), because what you actually did in a past situation predicts more than how you describe yourself. A clear way to answer is the STAR structure: the situation, the task you faced, the action you took, and the result. Prepare two or three real stories for the skills that matter most in the role, and notice that one good story often covers several skills at once. The group project that went off track can show teamwork, problem-solving, and initiative in a single answer. ## What makes all six easier to show Look back across the six entries and the same behaviors keep turning up in different places. A clear message appears under writing, under speaking, and under problem-solving. Keeping your word appears under teamwork and again under work ethic. The list is less like six separate projects than it first looks. **Communication** is what makes every other item on the list visible: an employer learns about your problem-solving or your teamwork only through how you explain it. At work it rests on a few habits: stating the main point first, being brief, wanting to understand before you reply, adjusting to how the other person takes in information, and judging when a short conversation will settle something faster than an email. Each of these can be practiced in the next message you send. **Teamwork** is what turns "team player" from a claim into a track record. It is built on trust: keeping the commitments you make to a group, sharing knowledge and credit freely, arguing about the work rather than the person, and then backing a decision the group made even when you argued for something else. None of this depends on being outgoing; it depends on what you do when the group needs you. **Professional Behaviors** cover the everyday conduct behind the work ethic employers look for, most of which nobody ever spells out: arriving on time, treating everyone with the same respect whatever their role, showing genuine interest in colleagues' work, expressing appreciation, and steering clear of the passive, negative, or arrogant habits that quietly undo good work. These are unwritten rules rather than personality, and they are the quickest of the three to put into practice, starting with whatever job or project you have now. Practice builds all three, and the months of part-time work or group projects ahead of you will do more if you know which habit to aim them at. You can find out [where practice pays off most](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) with the Job Skills Test, which scores these three alongside **nine other work skills**; since every one of them can be learned, a low score simply marks where to begin. ## Where your evidence already is Some of this is likely in your history already, even if you have never called it a soft skill. If you have rewritten a group email so the one person who always misreads things would get it right, or stayed past the end of a shift because the next person was running behind, you have done exactly the kind of thing employers are trying to find. Where the evidence is thinner, the gap is one of practice, and it closes the same way: by doing the behavior on purpose a few more times. Once you are hired, these six stop being lines on a resume and become how your manager and colleagues judge your work, so time spent on them now keeps paying back. Knowing your starting point is what makes that time well spent. ## Find your starting point The only step left is to see where you stand. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your workplace skills: in 7 minutes, it shows how you score across all twelve and which ones will make the biggest difference as you head into applications and interviews. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, 7 minutes, and your results show up instantly.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The soft skills employers want most from new graduates, from problem-solving to work ethic: what each looks like at work and how to prove it on a resume. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Teamwork, Professional Behaviors. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/teamwork.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/employability/soft-skills-employers-want/ Preferred summary: "The soft skills employers want most from new graduates, from problem-solving to work ethic: what each looks like at work and how to prove it on a resume." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.