Resume keywords, without the guesswork

Keywords are the words a recruiter types into their applicant tracking system to find people like you. Use the job posting's own words for the things you've genuinely done, put them where they belong in your experience, and stop there. There is no magic number and no safe way to stuff them.

Where to find them

In the posting, and nowhere else. The requirements section and the job title carry the weight; perks and “about us” carry none. Our job match pulls them out for you and weights them: a skill the posting lists as required counts more than a nice-to-have, and the job's title counts because recruiters search by title, literally.

Use the posting's spelling

A keyword search inside an ATS is literal. These pairs are not the same string to a database, even though they are the same thing to you:

• Amazon Web Services / AWS
• Adobe Creative Cloud / Adobe Creative Suite
• CI/CD / continuous integration
• PL/SQL / PLSQL / Oracle SQL
• React.js / ReactJS / React

Write the posting's version once, and keep your own alongside it: Amazon Web Services (AWS). That satisfies a literal search and still reads naturally to a person.

Put them where they prove something

A skills list claims; your experience proves. If a skill the job asks for appears only in your skills list and in no role, that is the first thing an interviewer picks on, and some recruiters discount it entirely. Add one line to the job where you used it, with what came of it. Our job match flags exactly these: skills the job wants that your resume lists but never shows.

How many?

Enough to cover what the job asks for, and no more. Advice you'll read online puts a number on it; we can't verify any of those numbers, and we won't repeat them. What we can measure is coverage: the share of the job's weighted keywords your resume carries. That's the number our job match shows, and the one worth raising.

What doesn't work

• A keyword wall at the end of the resume. A long list of unevidenced skills reads as padding to a person and adds nothing to a rules-based score.
• The same word 20 times. Repetition doesn't raise coverage; coverage counts each keyword once.
• Invisible text. White-on-white, 1pt, or text behind an image. We detect it, leave it out of your score, and tell you to remove it. See invisible text in resumes.
• Claiming a skill you don't have. It gets found in the first ten minutes of an interview.

Rewording, honestly

If you want help, our resume tailoring rewords your own lines for one job, inside your own file, keeping your layout. It never invents a skill, a number or an employer, it asks you to confirm anything it isn't sure about, and it lists every keyword it added so you can check each one. 1 credit = 1 tailored resume, from ₹49.

Check your own resume against everything on this page: the ATS score is free and instant, and a job match shows which of a job's keywords you already have. 3 free uploads a day, no sign-up.