You list your skills on your federal resume. Then nothing happens. No referral. No call. You start to wonder if anyone even read it.

Here is what most veterans miss. USAJOBS does not score your skills section the way a civilian recruiter skims a resume. The skills you type sit inside a process. A questionnaire. A rating. A ranked list of names. If your skills do not line up with that process, they carry no weight.

I have sat on hiring panels for positions in my federal chain. I worked from the cert the HR specialist sent up. The resumes that moved to the top all did one thing well. They wrote their skills in the exact words of the job announcement. The ones that sank used their own words and hoped someone would connect the dots. Nobody connects the dots for you.

This post shows you how the skills section actually gets read and scored. Then it shows you how to write it so it matches the announcement and lands you on the cert.

How does USAJOBS read your skills section?

USAJOBS runs on a back-end system called USA Staffing. It is the tool the HR specialist uses to score every application. People call it the federal ATS. That is close enough.

Here is the part that matters. The system does not throw your resume away. It racks and stacks. It lines every applicant up against the announcement and ranks them. A weak skills match does not get filtered out. It sinks to the bottom of the list. Same outcome, but the reason matters. You are not blocked. You are out-ranked.

So your skills section has two readers. First the system, scanning for the words and terms the announcement asks for. Then a human, the HR specialist or the selecting official, reading to confirm you actually did the work.

Both readers ask the same question. Does this person meet the specialized experience for this job? Your skills section either answers that fast or it makes them dig. The ones that make them dig get passed over.

What is the skills section really scored against?

Your skills do not get scored on their own. They get scored against two things in the announcement. Miss either one and your match drops.

The specialized experience block

Every federal announcement has a Qualifications section. Inside it is the specialized experience. This is the heart of the whole rating. It reads like a list of duties you must have already done.

The HR specialist checks your resume against this block line by line. If the block says you need experience managing supply accounts, they look for that. If it says you need experience writing technical reports, they look for that too.

Your skills section should mirror this block. Not copy it word for word in a fake way. But the same terms should show up, backed by real work you did.

The occupational questionnaire

Most jobs also have a questionnaire. You self-rate your skills on a scale. Expert. Advanced. None. It feels like a quiz.

Here is the trap. Whatever you claim on the questionnaire must be backed up in your resume. If you mark yourself an expert at budget management, your resume needs to show budget work. The HR specialist checks. If the resume does not support the rating, they can lower your score. That is called a rating adjustment, and it happens more than people think.

I cover this in more detail in the USAJOBS questionnaire guide. Your skills section and your questionnaire have to tell the same story.

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Why do the exact words matter so much?

This is the single biggest fix. Use the exact words from the announcement.

USAJOBS says this itself. Their help page is blunt about it. If the qualifications section says you need experience with MS Project, you need to use the words MS Project in your resume. Not project software. Not scheduling tools. MS Project. You can read the full guidance on the USAJOBS resume help page.

Why so strict? Because the system matches terms, not meaning. It does not know that your scheduling tool was MS Project. It sees two different phrases and scores them as a miss.

The human side works the same way under time pressure. The HR specialist may screen dozens of applications in a sitting. They are matching your words to the announcement words. Make them translate and you lose. Hand them the match and you win.

One more rule from the same USAJOBS page. Name the tool, the software, or the equipment you used. Name the specialized knowledge you gained. Vague skills do not score. Specific skills do.

Should the skills section stand alone or live in your experience?

Federal resumes work a little different from civilian ones. On a civilian resume you might drop a tidy skills box near the top. On a federal resume that box alone is not enough.

A standalone skills list with no proof reads as a wish list. The HR specialist needs to see the skill tied to real work. Where you used it. When. How long.

So do both. You can keep a short skills line for fast scanning. But the real scoring happens inside your work experience. That is where you show the skill in action with dates, hours per week, and results.

This is part of why federal resumes carry more detail than civilian ones. Hours per week. Supervisor names. Full duty descriptions. Even with all that detail, the target is still two pages. OPM set that limit in September 2025 as part of the Merit Hiring Plan, and you can see the official rule on the OPM two-page resume guidance page. For a deeper breakdown, read our take on the 2026 two-page federal resume limit.

How do you write a skills section that scores?

Here is the process I would run on any announcement. It takes maybe 30 minutes per job. It is the difference between a referral and silence.

Watch the count too. There is a line between matching the announcement and stuffing keywords. If a term shows up ten times for no reason, it reads fake to the human and can hurt you. We break this down in our piece on resume keyword stuffing. Match the announcement. Do not spam it.

If you want help finding the right terms in the first place, the USAJOBS resume keywords guide walks through how to pull them straight from the posting.

What do strong federal skills bullets look like?

A weak skills bullet names a skill. A strong one names the skill, the tool, the scale, and the result. Look at the difference.

See what the strong one does. It names the skill the announcement asked for. It names the tool. It adds scale and a result. That gives the system its match and gives the human their proof. One bullet, both readers covered.

If your work is mostly military so far, you can still write strong bullets. You just have to translate the task into plain civilian terms while keeping the announcement words. Our guide on specialized experience for military veterans shows how to do that without losing credit for the work.

What does the HR specialist actually flag?

From the hiring side of the desk, a few things jump out fast when a skills section is weak. Knowing them helps you avoid them.

The first flag is a claim with no home. You say you are skilled at contract oversight, but no job in your history shows it. The reviewer scans for the backing work, finds none, and moves on. The claim becomes noise.

The second flag is the mismatch between the questionnaire and the resume. You rated yourself expert, but the resume reads beginner. That gap stands out. It can drop your score, and worse, it makes the rest of your resume look inflated.

The third flag is the buzzword wall. A long line of soft skills with no specifics. Team player. Detail oriented. Self starter. None of that maps to specialized experience. It eats space and adds zero to your score.

The fix for all three is the same. Tie every skill to a real task, in the announcement words, with a number or result. If a skill cannot pass that test, cut it. A short honest skills section beats a long padded one every time.

What are the most common skills section mistakes?

I have read a lot of federal applications. The same mistakes keep showing up in the skills section. Here are the ones that cost veterans the most.

The last one is the biggest. Many veterans build one federal resume and send it everywhere. Each announcement has its own specialized experience and its own terms. A skills section tuned for one job will undersell you on the next. Tailor it each time, even if it is just swapping the named tools and key phrases.

If military acronyms are eating your skills section, translate them. Keep the term the announcement uses and add the plain meaning. Our guide on building a federal resume with military experience only covers how to do that without losing credit for the work.

How does this connect to KSAs and the rating?

You may see the term KSA. It stands for knowledge, skills, and abilities. Older federal jobs asked for separate KSA essays. Most jobs today fold KSAs into the questionnaire and the resume instead.

So your skills section is really a KSA proof. Each skill you claim should map to a knowledge, a skill, or an ability the job needs. The rating you get is built from how well your resume backs those up.

If you want copy-paste term lists by job series, our federal KSA keywords by job series guide is a good place to start. For full sample answers, see our KSA examples for federal resumes.

What should you do next?

Pull up the next job you want. Find the specialized experience block. Then read your current skills section next to it. Be honest. Does your wording match theirs? Does every claim have proof in your work history?

If the answer is no, you just found why you are not getting referred. The fix is not more skills. It is rewriting the ones you have to match the announcement.

This is slow to do by hand for every job. That is why we built the federal resume builder. You paste the announcement, and it helps line your experience up to the specialized experience and the right terms. It handles the military-to-civilian translation so your skills read clear to both the system and the person reading. Built by veterans who have sat on both sides of the federal hiring desk.

The skills section is small. The way it gets scored is not. Get it right and you move up the cert. That is where the calls come from.