How to pitch soft skills and not sound like dumbass

Bragging about having good soft skills is becoming as meaningless as claiming proficiency in MS Office a few years ago. All cool until you have to do a Pivot Table or edit Master Slide, right? But we also boast on how important they are, and how much effort and care we should put on them. So how to actually do a pitch about own soft skills?

Based on my experience, awareness of the importance of soft skills in the workplace is mainstream knowledge. In fact, it's occasionally overemphasised, so I won’t spend time discussing why or when they are valuable—I’ll assume you already know.

Still, there are times when you need to prove or pitch your soft skills. Whether during a recruitment interview, a one-on-one with your manager, a promotion discussion, or while trying to win over a client, how you present your abilities can significantly impact the outcome.

I usually see 2 common pitfalls people fall into. First one is that we are often prone to just list them. In same matter like tech frameworks we know or DB engines we worked with:

.Net, Angular, ExpresJS

MariaDB, Oracle, Cosmos DB

Reliable, result-driven, team player

Second one would be using very broad, sweeping sentences about them:

❌ As an honest person, I always handle financial matters reliably.

❌ I am highly motivated and results-driven.

❌ I am a team player and get on well with my superiors.

We aim to sound professional and competent, but this style often doesn’t reflect how we naturally talk about ourselves. The result? Claims that feel awkward, vague, or insincere—sometimes even downright cringe-worthy. Not really the image we wanted to go with…

Why that is

Let’s talk that through by investigating the last brag about being good team player. Why just stop at being good ? Why not excellent? Spectacular? Or just right away like Mike Tyson would say:

You can say whatever. Cuz what would you say if you were terrible team player? You would still say you’re fine coworker…

Everyone will claim to be good and no one will ever present the opposite. This is why such a statement is entirely worthless and just sounds ridiculous.

What to do instead

With this one simple trick… Okay, too much 😅 Yet really it’s at the same time borderline easy and very difficult. Instead of throwing around empty claims, you should present results of your work for previous employers that prove the soft skill in question.

Prove that you’re good with results and effects, not just claim you are

If asked if you’re a good runner, you would prove that with your times or show off some medals from coolest races you attended. If asked if you’re good driver you’d show trainings you did, how many trips you have done or share some interesting stories. Or when asked what’s your hobby, you wouldn’t just say you’re into F1. You’d share which teams you cheer, what excites you the most or show off your knowledge going in depth about some technical details of race cars. Proving soft skills shouldn’t by different.

Going back now to the team player example I grilled in previous point, let’s see how we could spice things about there:

✅

I’m a team centric person. For example after pretty tough to deliver feature we needed a bit of an integration and breathing space. I organised a fun team quiz during our workshop, incorporating diverse topics like sports, geography, and movies. We learned more about each other, spend some good time together effectively bringing morale back high.

✅

I do believe in team seen as a group of professionals aiming for greatness, where part of that is knowledge sharing. Last time around I convinced the team to do separate Teams channel where we posted anything that we considered interesting work wise. I learned a lot this way and we had numerous involving debates!

✅

Positive feedback and acknowledgement for doing good job is essential in projects I work on. I always prioritize team recognition. Let it be during retrospective, in Release Notes, company newsletter or stuff like Slack deployment channel. Easiest way to get feedback is to give feedback, thus I never hesitate to congrats people on doing something cool!

Specific actions, solid situations, clear results - and most importantly, you don’t sound like a fake douchebag! What a win!

bUt YOu hAvE tO gIVe nUMbErS!

Calm down KPI-cowboys. Of course if the goal and result is measurable, it would be great to say something like:

✅

During an integration project, conflicting priorities between stakeholders arose. By mediating discussions & building transparent roadmap I helped the teams reach a consensus, improving delivery time by 20%

But hard part is not every soft skill can be measured like that. Also not every company focuses on being such data driven, so you may not know exactly what the impact has been. Often all we have is just vibe & feel around our work and that can be enough, just make sure to properly describe what was the issue and what you did about it.

Other comparisons

✅

In a recent company-wide hackathon, I had change to test an idea of internal app for time registration that I very much needed. Soon after it happened to become a core feature of our ITSM, improving not reported time metrics by 45%! (motivation, proactive)

💡

I regularly facilitate retrospectives for my team, encouraging open discussions. I don’t know how to read minds, but I know how to ask questions so this is my best shot on understanding team dynamic. (communication)

⚡

As a Development Manager, I proactively provide regular progress updates to stakeholders, ensuring no surprises in deliverables or timelines. Good news or bad news - in my work transparency is major value that I want to respect. This has made wonders to our internal reputation at CIO & improved user experience! (reliability)

🐺

Most off companies I worked so far had mediocre onboarding procedures at best. After becoming the buddy for our colleague I decided to take my own shoot on it. Not gonna lie - it was really amazing. True commit on the first day, feature in a week flow. To this day I’m really proud about it. (mentoring, organisation)

Bonus: What if I have no such examples?

Last point, may not be the most comfortable one. What should you do if you struggle to come up with examples to illustrate your soft skills? Of course it takes few tries to nail your own narrative, so don’t get discouraged if the first results will sound cringy too. Just keep trying.

But there is another… Uncomfortable truth is that you actually may not have skill that you’re trying to pitch.

Have you ever proven to yourself that you’re a good team player? Those stupid people that you had to work with - Were they really that stupid or you just struggled with cooperating with them?

What makes you motivated? Besides pay check of course. What actually makes you professional? Or organised?

I’m not trying to roast you, but it may be that you may not have those skills as developed as you may believe. There is nothing bad in it. It’s event better as you have a great reference point if you wish to start working on them. I’ll not be preaching about those though. Go your way, grow into your own shape, have fun doing so :-)