Definition
Resume keywords
Resume keywords are the specific skills, tools, qualifications, and job-title terms a resume shares with a job description. Matching them helps a resume rank higher in ATS searches and signals relevance to recruiters.
Keywords are how recruiters find candidates inside an ATS and how match scoring works. They include hard skills (e.g. "Python", "financial modeling"), tools ("Salesforce"), certifications, and the exact job-title language the posting uses.
The goal is honest alignment, not stuffing: use the terms that genuinely describe your experience and that the specific job asks for. Tailoring keywords per application beats a single generic resume, because every posting weights different terms.
Common questions
- How do I find the right keywords for a resume?
- Pull them from the specific job description — its required skills, tools, and repeated phrases. Resuvia’s match check extracts a posting’s must-have and nice-to-have keywords and flags the ones your resume is missing.
Put it to work
Related terms
ATS score
An ATS score is a 0–100 rating of how well a resume matches a specific job description — typically based on keyword overlap, required skills, and formatting readability. A higher score means a closer match to what the job asks for.
Resume tailoring
Resume tailoring is adjusting a resume for a specific job — matching its keywords, reordering bullets to lead with the most relevant experience, and mirroring its language — so it scores higher and reads as a closer fit.
Keyword stuffing
Keyword stuffing is cramming a resume with job-description terms — often hidden or repeated unnaturally — to game an ATS. It backfires: recruiters spot it, modern systems weight context, and it makes a resume read poorly to humans.
Hard skills vs soft skills
Hard skills are teachable, measurable abilities like coding, accounting, or a specific tool. Soft skills are interpersonal traits like communication or leadership. ATS keyword matching weights hard skills; recruiters weigh both.
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