ATS and screening
Resume keywords: how to match a job description properly
Mirroring the posting's vocabulary is legitimate and effective. Padding a keyword list is neither.
Two things get called keyword optimisation and they are not the same.
Mirroring is using the employer's words for work you genuinely did. It is legitimate, it helps both parsers and human readers, and it takes ten minutes.
Stuffing is padding the document with terms to game a score. It is detectable in seconds and it ends applications.
This is the method for the first one.
Why vocabulary matters at all
Two mechanisms, both mundane.
Where an ATS scores at all, it usually scores overlap between the requisition text and your document. It does not know that "worked with people across the business" and "stakeholder management" describe the same thing.
More importantly, a human skimming for seven seconds is pattern-matching against the posting they just wrote. If they are looking for "revenue operations" and your resume says "sales support", you are asking them to do a translation they have no time for.
There is more on what parsers actually do in how ATS software works.
The ten-minute method
1. Paste the posting into a plain document
Strip the boilerplate: benefits, company mission, equal-opportunity statement. What is left is the requirement.
2. Mark three groups
- Hard requirements — named tools, certifications, languages, degrees, years. These are the ones a filter might key on.
- Repeated concepts — anything said twice or in both the responsibilities and requirements. Repetition is the employer telling you what matters.
- Their vocabulary choices — where they picked one term over an equivalent: "revenue operations" not "sales ops"; "stakeholder management" not "cross-functional collaboration"; "SRE" not "DevOps".
That third group is the one people miss, and it is the cheapest to fix.
3. Sort your list honestly
Three columns:
- Have it, said it. Already on your resume in their words. Nothing to do.
- Have it, said it differently. The real work. Rewrite in their vocabulary.
- Do not have it. Leave alone. Do not add it.
That last column is where the temptation lives. Adding a tool you have not used gets you an interview you will fail, which is worse than the rejection.
4. Rewrite the middle column
Not by appending keywords — by changing the words already in the sentence.
Posting says stakeholder management. You have:
Worked with people across the business to agree priorities.
Rewrite:
Ran stakeholder management across finance, ops and engineering to agree a single quarterly priority list for 40+ requests.
Same fact, their vocabulary, and now with scope.
Posting says incident response and you wrote fixing outages:
Owned incident response on a 24/7 rota; cut mean time to recovery from 90 to 25 minutes across 18 months.
5. Put them where they count
- Experience bullets — first choice always. A keyword inside a sentence about work you did is evidenced. The same word in a list is a claim.
- Skills section — second. Group it, and only include what you can defend.
- Summary — two or three, no more.
- Job titles — if your internal title was unusual, the common equivalent in brackets is fair: "Delivery Lead (Engineering Manager)".
6. Handle acronyms once
Spell it out with the abbreviation once — "Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)" — then use whichever form the posting uses. That covers both matches without repeating yourself.
What not to do
No keyword block. A grey list at the bottom is visible to every human reader and signals that you optimised rather than wrote.
No white text. Paste any PDF as plain text and it appears immediately. This is one of the few things that gets a candidate remembered rather than just rejected.
Do not copy responsibility sentences. Lifting "Responsible for developing and executing the regional marketing strategy" from the posting describes their vacancy, not your record. Reviewers who wrote the posting recognise their own sentences.
Do not tailor everything. Rewriting a whole resume per application is not sustainable and does not pay. The summary, the skills order and two or three bullets is enough.
A worked example
Posting extract:
Looking for a Revenue Operations Manager to own our Salesforce instance, improve forecast accuracy and partner with Sales and Finance on quota planning. Experience with dbt and a BI tool required.
Marked up: revenue operations, Salesforce, forecast accuracy, quota planning, dbt, BI tool. Repeated concept: forecasting.
Before:
Sales support analyst. Maintained the CRM, built reports for the sales team and helped with the annual targets process.
After:
Revenue operations analyst. Owned the Salesforce instance for 60 sellers and rebuilt the forecasting model in dbt, lifting quarterly forecast accuracy from 71% to 89%. Partnered with Finance on annual quota planning across 3 regions; reporting in Looker.
Every marked term is there, all of it is true, and it now reads as the same job the posting describes. Note also that "helped with" is gone — see action verbs.
Where this stops mattering
Vocabulary matching gets you into consideration for a role you can genuinely do. It does not compensate for a real mismatch, and it does not beat two things that matter more:
- Applying early. Recruiters read from the top of a list and stop when they have enough. Week one substantially beats week three.
- A referral. It usually skips the queue entirely.
Ten minutes of mirroring per application is a good use of time. An hour of keyword engineering is not.