Last updated: 25th Nov 2024
How effectively you talk about your stakeholder management skills on your resume can help secure you an interview — so read on to learn how to get it right.
However, if you need more hands-on help to refine your resume, consider using our:
- Recommended free resume builder, if you’re on a budget.
- Premium resume writing service, if you’re a mid-career professional.
- Executive resume writing service, if you’re a senior leader.
What Is Stakeholder Management?
People with strong stakeholder skills help companies run smoothly.
They improve how decisions are made and received — based on a two-way dialogue with interested and impacted parties.
Important!
Stakeholders can include both individuals and groups who are directly involved in a decision or piece of work, or merely have the ability to influence the outcome.
That can include employees, directors, customers, members, industry bodies, investors, suppliers, community groups, regulators, politicians and the media.
For instance:
- Keeping your CFO informed may be vital for a large organisational change project – because they’ll be needed to assess ROI and approve additional expenditure.
- Building positive connections with leaders of environmental, First Nations and charitable non-profits may be critical to meeting ESG targets set by your company.
Creating engaged and enthusiastic stakeholders is especially valuable in these roles:
| Project/Program Management |
| Learning & Development / Organisational Development |
| Operations Management |
Important!
C-suite leaders will often be required to work collaboratively with multiple external stakeholders, often with diverging views, to raise an organisation’s profile and ‘social licence to operate’.
Leaders and managers who fail to consider views of competing stakeholders are more likely to face resistance, overlook risks, and miss growth opportunities.
Nike CEO Jonathon Donahoe is a classic example – he has the dubious honour of making Nike uncool.
(Related: Sell Your Leadership Skills On Your Resume.)
Which Stakeholder Management Skills Matter The Most?
The right stakeholder management skills to include on your resume depends on:
| Your seniority |
| Whether it’s a public, private, NGO or Board role |
| The industry / sector |
| How much emphasis the job ad places on stakeholder skills |
An NGO campaigner and an ops manager of a warehouse both need to be able to manage stakeholders — but to varying degrees, and they’ll deal with very different kinds of stakeholders.
You need to prove you can do the work to capture people’s input, keep people informed and bring them onside.
That can include tasks like:
| Project design and management | Running surveys |
| Creating communications | Facilitating meetings |
Your skills may have been honed through small, discrete tasks, that you didn’t categorise as stakeholder engagement at the time. For instance perhaps you:
- Helped facilitate user acceptance testing as part of a software development project.
- Held regular check-ins with manager peers to discuss cross-functional collaboration.
- Ran Q&A webinars to answer questions about grant programs from potential grantees.
- Developed media statements for the CEO as part of crisis communications responses.
- Organised recognition events to celebrate the results of affiliate marketing program members.
Where stakeholder engagement is the core responsibility of a position, consider ways to demonstrate a deeper understanding of methodologies and practices.
Ask yourself:
- What knowledge, data and processes you’ve used to identify, analyse and prioritise stakeholders to focus on and risks to address?
- How you’ve determined various stakeholders’ information needs, communication methods and channels to use, and the cadence and composition of communications?
- How you balanced competing stakeholder expectations, resolved conflicts with stakeholders and worked through issues to get people’s support.
- What methods you’ve used to monitor the success of your stakeholder engagement approach and what insights and improvements that enabled?
- How you’ve adjusted your tactics or messaging based on changing market conditions and social trends, or unexpected events that impacted stakeholders?
You can see how stakeholder management dovetails with a range of hard and soft skills. Look for opportunities to include relevant skill keywords on your resume, like:
- Project management
- Agile methodology
- Time management
- Event management
- Public speaking
- Networking
- Collaboration
- Cultural competence
- Empathy/EQ
- Digital marketing
- Communication skills
- Social media management
- Research skills
- Analytical thinking
- Reporting skills
- Adaptability
- Change management
- Active listening
- Problem-solving
- Risk management
- Negotiation skills
- Conflict resolution
- Strategy and leadership
(Related: How To Describe Analytical Skills On Your Resume).
How To Describe Your Stakeholder Management Skills.
The words you use to describe your skills has a huge impact on how hiring managers will perceive your resume.
Being too grandiose, boring or vague will leave hiring managers unimpressed.
Focus on crafting compelling achievements relevant to your past roles, under your resume’s ‘Work Experience’ section.
When you’re phrasing your stakeholder engagement achievements, be sure to:
- Explain how your efforts led to beneficial relationships, win-win outcomes or generated strong support for a course of action.
- Use action verbs and specific language and numbers to make your sentences pop and stand apart from other candidates.
Wrong:
Right:
Here are some more examples of how to write about stakeholder management skills in a way that quantifies your achievement.
| How you adapt and use data to understand stakeholders. | Developed a survey in collaboration with industry peak bodies that reached over 2,000 respondents to gain an in-depth understanding of how our customer base was affected by new industrial relations laws. |
| How you leverage stakeholder relationships to overcome a problem. | Led contingency planning with stakeholders after a major sponsor dropped out, to rapidly update the program, negotiate with vendors and secure in-kind support, which ensured we delivered on budget. |
| How you grow an organisation’s engagement and communication capabilities. | Oversaw an upgrade of Council’s online community portal to address usability issues and automate email alerts, which increased feedback received on draft proposals by more than 40% within 12 months. |
You can also highlight your prowess in handling stakeholder relationships in sections such as your summary/profile and your list of skills/key assets. But avoid the temptation to say something banal like “I possess strong stakeholder management skills.”
- In your profile: Use specific examples that illustrate the outcomes or organisational benefits you deliver through influencing others, and the scope of your past experience.
- Under skills: Include technical skills such as proficiency with customer relationship management (CRM) or project management software.
If you have specific stakeholder engagement credentials, such as an IAP2 Certificate of Engagement, you may want to highlight this in your profile/cover letter in addition to your ‘education’ section.
Show Employers You Can Engage Stakeholders.
If a job ad lists stakeholder engagement or stakeholder management as a required competency, you’d be silly not to update your resume accordingly.
Stakeholder management is an in-demand skill because many promising ideas fall flat or can’t be easily scaled due to a lack of cooperation or enthusiasm from stakeholders.
Use the tips we’ve shared to tailor your resume, and show recruiters you’ve got what it takes to ensure stakeholders feel heard, informed and inspired.
But if you want a professional second opinion to get the wording spot-on, the experts at Arielle Executive can help you with personal branding, resume and cover letter creation, and interview preparation.
Jody
