Resume Keywords and How to Use Them

You read "CI/CD" and "continuous integration" as the same thing. A search may not. The same applies to "React" and "React.js", or "Electronic Health Records" and "EHR". Where you have the skill, use the form the posting uses. For a term with a common abbreviation, write both once: "Electronic Health Records (EHR)".

The Job Description Matcher on this site uses a hand-built list of skills with alternative spellings, so "K8s" in a posting matches "Kubernetes" on your resume. An employer's system may handle variants differently, so using the posting's own form is still the safer choice.

Put your five to eight most important terms in more than one place. List each one in your skills section, use it in at least one bullet that shows what you did with it, and include the most important ones in your summary.

For example, if a posting asks for Power BI, list it under Skills, write a bullet such as "Built a weekly sales dashboard in Power BI for 6 regional managers", and mention it in your summary if it is central to the role. The numbers in this example are illustrative.

Include the job title too. If the posting says "Business Analyst" and your resume never uses that phrase, the reader has to work it out. The resume summary guide shows how to put the title in a headline. The ATS checker flags this when the target role you set in the builder does not appear anywhere in your resume.

Collect three to five postings for the role you want. Terms that appear in most of them belong on your main resume. Terms that appear in only one posting belong in the version you send to that employer.

Pay most attention to the requirements or qualifications section. The Job Description Matcher gives a skill found there 1.5 times the weight of the same skill mentioned elsewhere in the posting, and adds a little weight for repeated mentions, up to a limit.

The matcher's score has three parts: skills from its skill list (60%), other repeated terms from the posting that are not on that list, such as industry terms (30%), and whether the job title appears in your resume (10%). If a posting contains no skills from the list, that part is dropped and the other parts are rescaled. A nurse's resume compared with a software engineering posting scores 0%.

Use the score to find gaps. Aiming for 100% can lead you to copy the posting, and a person reading your resume will notice. Work through the list of missing terms instead: add each one you have, and leave off each one you do not.

Repeating a term many times makes your resume harder for a recruiter to read. Hiding a block of keywords in white or tiny text can work against you: extracted text ignores colour and size, so hidden words can appear as ordinary text when a recruiter opens your application. The ATS-friendly resume guide covers this and other common beliefs, and the guides page lists the guides for each section where your keywords go.

Two to four uses of an important term, in different parts of your resume, are enough for a reader to see it.