- Start with required skills, tools, credentials, and role-specific phrases in the posting.
- Place a term where your experience proves it.
- Use both an acronym and full name when each appears in the field.
- Treat keyword overlap as a review aid, not a hiring forecast.
Which terms deserve attention?
Read the job description for repeated nouns and named requirements. Product names, licenses, programming languages, methods, and domain terms are more useful than generic phrases such as hard worker.
Separate a true requirement from employer background copy. A term repeated in responsibilities and qualifications matters more than a word in the company mission statement.
Write evidence, not a keyword pile
A skills section can make tools easy to find. Work bullets should show where you used the important ones. If the posting asks for PostgreSQL, a bullet about tuning PostgreSQL queries carries more information than adding PostgreSQL to a long list.
Use exact spelling where it is natural. For common variants, write the full term once with its acronym, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
How our matcher works
The browser tool lowercases text, normalizes punctuation, removes common stopwords, counts repeated job terms, and compares single terms plus selected two-word phrases. It gives more weight to phrases and repeated terms from the job description.
It does not parse a PDF, infer seniority, understand every synonym, or reproduce a vendor model. Its output is a revision queue.
Sources used on this page
- Search resumes for keywordsGreenhouse Support
Shows recruiter keyword search as a separate workflow from parsing.
- Concept: Candidate Skills MatchWorkday Documentation
Documents an optional skills-match feature, its supported files, and its Strong to Low labels.
- Resume Parser FieldsRChilli Documentation
Shows the structured fields a commercial parser can return, including experience, education, contact details, and skills.