Resume keywords: how to find them and where to put them

What a resume keyword is

A keyword is a term a recruiter is likely to search for: a skill (SQL, financial modelling), a tool (Salesforce, Figma), a domain (payments, healthcare), a certification (PMP, CPA) or a title. Applicant tracking systems make your resume searchable; keywords are what the search runs on.

Finding them in the posting

The best keyword list for a job is the job description. Read it once for meaning, then again for vocabulary, and pull out the nouns: skills, tools, methods, domains. Pay most attention to the requirements and qualifications lists, and to anything repeated.

Our free job match checker does this automatically: paste the posting and your resume, and it shows which terms you cover, which are only in a skills list, and which are missing. It runs in your browser and needs no account.

Which ones matter

Not every term is equal. Treat them in three tiers:

1. Required — under “Requirements” or “You have”. These are what recruiters filter on.
2. Preferred — under “Nice to have” or “Bonus”. These break ties between otherwise equal resumes.
3. Context — mentioned in the description of the work. Useful for your summary, rarely decisive.

In our scorer, required keywords carry the largest single share of the job-match score, preferred ones a much smaller share — mirroring how a recruiter weighs them.

Where to put them

Here is the part most keyword advice misses. Where a term appears matters as much as whether it does. A skills list is a claim; a bullet that shows you using the skill is evidence. Our scorer weights a term by its best placement:

So the skills list is not where keywords go to count — it is a backstop. Every required skill should appear in at least one experience bullet.

Recency

A skill you used last year means more than one you used nine years ago, and recruiters read it that way. Our scorer gives full weight to experience from the last 2 years, then fades it gradually to 50% for anything 8 or more years old. If a required skill only appears in an old role, consider whether you have used it more recently and not written it down.

Synonyms and acronyms

Better systems match synonyms — our scorer treats “k8s” and “Kubernetes”, or “JS” and “JavaScript”, as the same term — but you should not count on every ATS doing the same. Two cheap habits remove the risk:

• Use the posting’s exact phrase at least once, even if you usually say it differently.
• Write an acronym out in full once: “search engine optimisation (SEO)”, “key performance indicators (KPIs)”.

Stuffing, and why it backfires

Keyword stuffing — long lists of every term in the posting, repeated words, hidden white text — fails twice. Recruiters read the extracted text, where stuffing is obvious and hidden text is not hidden. And a good scorer is built to resist it: ours caps how much keywords alone can earn, so a stuffed resume that misses the title, level and years still lands in the fifties.