Putting a resume together can be extremely difficult, simply because of the large amount of information that you can include on it. Obviously, you can’t pick everything, but what do you choose? What critical piece of information about yourself will land you that dream job and which piece will shut the door on you?

I’ve written a previous article on my Top 5 Resume Mistakes, and now I’d like to share two areas that you really want to focus on in your resume. While they are not the only things you want to put on your resume, you definitely want to make strong cases for each of them.

Leadership Qualities

Your ability to be a leader is definitely something that you want to showcase on your resume. In almost every field, regardless of the work, the ability to lead people is what gets you promoted. It’s only natural that as you progress up the “corporate ladder” so to speak, that you will be farther removed from the low level work and more focused on managing the people who perform the lower level work. This is the basic model behind any business. Therefore, employers look for this ability as a key quality to someone that they’ll want to keep around for awhile. Show how you can be a leader and I guarantee you’ll put yourself a cut above at least half of your competitors.

Ability to work with a Client

While many people laugh at the term “people skills”, there is some validity to including this kind of information on your resume. You obviously don’t want to use the terms “people skills”, “people person”, etc. but showing that you can work with others to get things done is essential to your success. Even more importantly, you want to show that you can work with “clients”, or people that pay your company for your services. Being more involved in selling work to potential and existing clients and working out issues with them is another gateway to the upper echelons of most industries, so this is something that you definitely want to show you can do. Many people can handle the behind the scenes work where all you do is work with people from your own company, but you’ll really stand out if you show that you can work with your clients as well.

Are these the only areas you want to focus on in your resume? No. However, in my opinion they are very important, and if you have some information about yourself and your experience that goes into one of these categories you should try to include it. While this doesn’t eliminate the problem of what to include on your resume, at the very least it points out two areas that are “must includes”.