Can You Evaluate Soft Skills Through AI Resume Screening?

Introduction

Evaluating soft skills from resumes isn’t easy — and it’s definitely not perfect. But when you’re screening hundreds (or thousands) of applicants, you often need early indicators to make informed decisions about who should move forward.

While in-depth soft skill assessment should happen during interviews, you can still spot some valuable sparks during resume screening — and that’s where AI can help.

🔍 Why Even Try to Evaluate Soft Skills at This Stage?

Because time is limited and volume is high. You need to reduce the pool, and a well-designed screening process can help you:

• Prioritize the most promising candidates
• Tailor interview questions around soft skill indicators
• Save time on applicants who clearly don’t meet key behavioral requirements

But how do you find soft skills in a resume without making the process overly subjective or biased?

🔎 10 Soft Skills You Can Detect in a Resume — With Specific Examples

Here’s a breakdown of the top soft skills recruiters care about, with real resume examples to look for:

🗣 1. Communication Skills

What to look for:

• Clear, typo-free writing with consistent formatting
• Statements like:
• “Presented quarterly results to C-level stakeholders”
• “Drafted customer success documentation used across departments”
• “Wrote and edited marketing copy for digital campaigns reaching 1M+ users”

🎯 2. Leadership Skills

What to look for:

• Keywords like: led, managed, mentored, owned, spearheaded
• Examples:
• “Managed a team of 12 developers across 3 countries”
• “Mentored 5 interns, 3 of whom transitioned into full-time roles”
• “Spearheaded cross-functional initiative that reduced onboarding time by 40%”

🤝 3. Teamwork Skills

What to look for:

• Collaborative action verbs: collaborated, partnered, supported
• Phrases like:
• “Worked closely with product and engineering teams to launch MVP”
• “Supported peer review process during code releases”
• “Led cross-departmental task force for company OKRs”

⏱ 4. Time Management

What to look for:

• Examples of handling volume or multitasking:
• “Handled 60+ support tickets per day with 98% satisfaction rate”
• “Delivered 3 projects ahead of schedule within one quarter”
• “Managed internship alongside full-time university coursework”

📊 5. Analytical Skills

What to look for:

• Mentions of tools: Excel, SQL, Python, Tableau, Power BI
• Phrases like:
• “Built dashboards to track monthly churn across 5 products”
• “Analyzed 100k+ data rows to improve lead conversion by 20%”
• “Created automated reports for sales forecasting”

🧩 6. Problem-Solving

What to look for:

• Action + outcome phrasing:
• “Redesigned onboarding flow to reduce drop-off by 30%”
• “Solved long-standing issue in payment system by identifying logic bug”
• “Improved uptime from 92% to 99.5% in 6 months”

🎨 7. Creativity

What to look for:

• Roles or achievements with innovation or new ideas:
• “Launched a viral TikTok campaign generating 2M views”
• “Developed a chatbot to automate HR FAQs”
• “Created custom spreadsheet template to streamline inventory tracking”

🔄 8. Adaptability

What to look for:

• Career shifts, multiple industries, or startup-to-corporate jumps
• Example statements:
• “Pivoted from sales to product marketing after taking 3-month bootcamp”
• “Helped migrate from in-office to fully remote work during pandemic”
• “Worked in 4 countries in last 5 years in multicultural teams”

💡 9. Critical Thinking

What to look for:

• Roles with strategy or planning components:
• “Analyzed pricing strategy to uncover 15% margin opportunity”
• “Developed risk mitigation framework used across 3 departments”
• “Created decision matrix to optimize vendor selection”

📁 10. Project Management

What to look for:

• Tools: Jira, Trello, Asana, Notion, Monday.com
• Methods: Scrum, Agile, Lean
• Examples:
• “Managed $300k budget across 6-month launch cycle”
• “Oversaw remote team of 10 freelancers to complete website redesign”

🤖 How Brainner Helps You Screen Soft Skills — Objectively

With Brainner, soft skills become part of your screening strategy — not a guessing game.

Here’s how we do it:

1. Define Criteria

Add soft skills as non-mandatory requirements to your job setup. This keeps them out of the candidate scoring but still tracked in each report.

2. Let AI Do the Work

Brainner’s model has been trained to recognize patterns across thousands of resumes — it looks beyond keywords to identify true indicators of each soft skill.

3. Make Better Decisions

Instead of gut feeling, you get structured, unbiased summaries of how each resume matches your hard and soft criteria — and which ones deserve your attention.

🎯 Final Tip

When used with care, soft skill indicators can help reduce noise in your pipeline and elevate the best-fit profiles. But don’t rely on them blindly.

That’s why Brainner was built — to give you objective analysis at scale, while letting you keep your human judgment where it matters most.