How to Find and Use the Right Keywords From a Job Description

Recruiters often search their applicant database for specific skills, tools and job titles. If your resume describes the right experience in different words, it may never show up in those searches. Matching the language of the job description, honestly, is one of the highest-impact changes you can make.

What counts as a keyword

• Hard skills: “financial modelling”, “SQL”, “patient assessment”, “copywriting”.
• Tools and platforms: “Salesforce”, “Figma”, “AWS”, “QuickBooks”.
• Certifications and qualifications: “PMP”, “CPA”, “ACCA”, “Google Ads certified”.
• Job titles and seniority: “Senior Product Designer”, “Team Lead”.
• Domain terms: “B2B SaaS”, “supply chain”, “HIPAA”, “e-commerce”.

Soft skills like “communication” or “team player” are rarely what recruiters search for. Show them through your achievements instead of listing them.

Step 1: Collect keywords from several postings

Don't rely on one job ad. Open three to five postings for the role you want and note the terms that keep appearing. Repeated terms are the core of the role; terms that appear once are often nice-to-haves. Pay special attention to anything in a “Requirements” or “Must have” section.

Step 2: Keep only what's true for you

Go through your list and mark each keyword: have you actually used this skill or tool? Only those go on your resume. If an important requirement is missing, that's useful too: it's either a gap to address in your cover letter or a sign the role isn't the right fit yet.

Step 3: Put keywords where they count

1. In your experience bullets, attached to what you achieved with them. This carries the most weight with human readers.
2. In your skills section, as a clean list for quick scanning and searching.
3. In your summary, if you have one: two or three of the most important terms for the role.
4. In your job title line, when your actual title was unusual but the work matched a standard title. For example “Customer Champion (Customer Success Manager)”.

Match the exact wording

• Use the same form as the posting: if it says “Amazon Web Services”, don't only write “cloud”.
• Include acronyms and full forms once: “Customer Relationship Management (CRM)”.
• Watch small variations that a search might treat differently, such as “Node.js” vs “Node” or “e-commerce” vs “ecommerce”. Mirror the posting.

Why keyword stuffing and hidden text backfire

Some advice suggests pasting the job description into your resume in white text, or repeating keywords dozens of times. Don't. Parsers extract hidden text just like visible text, so it appears in your profile for the recruiter to see. A resume that reads like a keyword list also fails the human review that comes straight after the search. It looks like an attempt to game the process, which is the opposite of the impression you want.