Keywords from the job posting

When a recruiter searches their applicant database, they type the words from the job description — because that is the document in front of them. If your CV describes the same skill in different words, it does not come up. Matching the posting's vocabulary is therefore not a trick; it is translation, from how you describe your work to how this employer describes the work they need done.

Read the posting as a list of searchable terms

Print the posting or paste it somewhere you can mark it up, and highlight every concrete noun: tools, languages, methods, certifications, job titles, industries, regulations. Those are the terms a recruiter can search for, and they are the ones to mirror exactly. "Project management" and "managing projects" are the same to a human and may not be to a keyword search; "PostgreSQL" and "Postgres" likewise. Note the posting's own spelling and capitalisation and use it. Pay attention to what is repeated or listed under "essential" rather than "desirable" — those are the searches most likely to be run. Then look at the job title itself: if the posting says "Customer Success Manager" and your last role was called "Account Manager" but was the same job, say so, for instance "Account Manager (Customer Success)".

Hard skills, soft skills and where each goes

Hard skills — software, languages, techniques, qualifications — are what recruiters search for, because they are unambiguous. They belong in a skills section where they can be found at a glance, and again in the experience bullets where you actually used them, because a skill with a context is more credible than a skill in a list. Soft skills — communication, leadership, attention to detail — are rarely searched for and almost never believed in a list, because everyone claims them. Do not put "team player" in your skills section; instead write a bullet in which you did something that a team player does, and let the reader draw the conclusion. If a posting stresses a soft skill, the summary is the place to reflect it, in one concrete phrase.

Where keywords belong on the page

Three places, in order of weight. The summary at the top, where the two or three most important terms should appear in a sentence that also says what you are. The skills section, as a plain list — comma-separated or bulleted, without proficiency bars or icons, which parsers cannot read and humans distrust. And the experience bullets, where each term appears next to what you did with it. A term that appears only in the skills list and nowhere in the experience reads as aspirational; a term that appears in three bullets and the summary reads as your actual trade. Do not add terms you cannot support in an interview: the keyword gets you the conversation, and the conversation is where the claim is tested.

Keyword stuffing and invisible text

Two tactics circulate that you should not use. The first is stuffing: a block of thirty keywords in the skills section, or a sentence repeated so a term appears more often. Keyword searches in most systems are binary — the term is present or it is not — so repetition gains nothing, and a human reading the block sees exactly what it is. The second is hidden text: keywords in white on a white background, or in a tiny font, so the parser sees them and the reader does not. The parser does see them — and so does the recruiter, who sees the original file and often the extracted text side by side, where white text is plainly visible. Some systems strip or flag invisible text; more importantly, being caught doing it ends the application. The honest version of both tactics is simply to describe your real experience in the posting's vocabulary.

The keyword comparison in the app

In Pro, the ATS check panel lets you paste the job posting and shows two lists: terms from the posting that appear in your CV, and terms that do not. It is a word-level comparison, so it will surface things you should not add (the company's name, generic words) alongside things you should (a tool you used but forgot to name). Use it as a checklist to read against, not as a target to score: the aim is a CV in which every relevant term from the posting appears naturally, once or twice, in real sentences. The comparison cannot know how any employer's system weights terms, and a full list of matches is not a guarantee of anything — it is a way of noticing what you left out.