You can have the right experience, the right qualifications, and the right number of years in the field — and still not hear back from a job application. In many cases, the reason is not your background. It is your keywords.
Applicant tracking systems scan every CV for specific terms before a recruiter reads a single word. If the language in your resume does not match the language in the job description closely enough, your application is filtered out automatically. No human ever sees it.
This guide explains what ATS keywords are, how to find the right ones for any job you are applying for, where to place them in your CV, and how to use them effectively without tipping over into keyword stuffing. If you want to understand the broader mechanics of how automated screening works first, start with the guide on how applicant tracking systems work.
What Are ATS Keywords?
ATS keywords are the specific words and phrases that an applicant tracking system looks for when it scans your CV. They typically fall into several categories:
Hard skills and technical competencies
Tools, software, platforms, programming languages, methodologies, and certifications. Examples: Salesforce, Python, PRINCE2, Google Analytics, AutoCAD, ISO 9001.
Job-specific terminology
The functional language of the role. A marketing role might reference "demand generation", "conversion rate optimisation", or "content calendar". A finance role might use "variance analysis", "P&L ownership", or "financial modelling".
Qualifications and credentials
Degree types, professional certifications, and regulatory requirements. If a job requires a specific qualification — CPA, PMP, CIMA, SIA licence — and you hold it, it needs to appear on your CV using the same abbreviation or full form as the job description.
Soft skills
Increasingly, ATS systems also scan for behavioural terms: "stakeholder management", "cross-functional collaboration", "project delivery". These matter less than hard skills in automated scoring but still contribute to overall keyword coverage.
The key principle: ATS systems are matching text, not evaluating meaning. A system looking for "project management" will not automatically credit "led a team to deliver complex initiatives on time and budget" — even though both describe the same capability. The specific term needs to appear.
Why Keyword Matching Matters More Than You Might Expect
Most large employers and many mid-sized ones use ATS software to manage applications at volume. According to widely cited industry data, the majority of CVs submitted to companies using ATS are never read by a human — they are filtered out at the automated stage.
The threshold varies by system and employer, but the principle is consistent: applications that score below a certain keyword match percentage against the job description are deprioritised or rejected before any human review occurs. For competitive roles attracting hundreds of applications, this threshold can be set quite high.
This is why tailoring your CV to each job description produces meaningfully better response rates than sending a single master CV everywhere. The job description is, in effect, the answer key. Applications that mirror it closely score higher.
How to Find the Right ATS Keywords for Any Job
You do not need specialised tools to identify the right keywords for a given application. The job description contains almost everything you need — if you know how to read it.
Step 1: Read the job description twice
On the first read, get a general sense of the role. On the second, go line by line and highlight every specific term, skill, tool, qualification, and phrase that describes what the employer is looking for. Pay particular attention to:
- The requirements section (essential and desirable)
- The responsibilities section — especially repeated phrases
- Any named tools, platforms, or methodologies
- Any certifications or qualifications listed
Step 2: Identify what appears more than once
Terms that appear multiple times in a single job description are almost always important to that employer. If "stakeholder engagement" appears in the job summary, the responsibilities section, and the requirements section, it is a high-priority keyword. Make sure it appears in your CV.
Step 3: Note exact phrasing
ATS systems are often configured to match exact strings. "Project Manager" and "project management" may score differently. Where possible, use the same phrasing as the job description — and if a term could be expressed multiple ways, include both forms naturally in your document.
Step 4: Cross-reference against your own experience
Go through your keyword list and mark each term as either present in your CV already, present in your experience but not named, or genuinely absent. The middle category is where most of the work sits — experience you have that is not yet described in language the ATS will recognise.
Step 5: Check similar job descriptions
Pull two or three similar job descriptions from different employers and look for keywords that appear across all of them. These are the core terms for the role as a category, not just the preferences of one employer. They are the highest-value keywords to have on your CV because they will transfer across multiple applications.
Where to Place Keywords in Your CV
Once you have identified the right keywords, placement matters. ATS systems weight keywords differently depending on where they appear in the document.
Professional summary — High weight
The summary appears near the top of the document and is parsed early. Including your most important keywords here, woven naturally into two to four sentences, gives them maximum visibility.
Work experience bullet points — High weight
This is where keywords should appear in context — not as a list, but as part of descriptions of what you actually did. "Managed a Salesforce CRM implementation across a 12-person sales team" scores for "Salesforce", "CRM", and "implementation" simultaneously, in a way that reads naturally.
Skills section — Medium to high weight
A dedicated skills section is a legitimate and expected place to list tool names, certifications, and technical competencies. Keep it clean: a simple list or grouped categories, no graphics or tables.
Job titles — Medium weight
If your job title at a previous employer was non-standard but the role was functionally equivalent to the target role's title, consider adding a brief clarification in parentheses. "Growth Lead (Digital Marketing Manager)" gives ATS systems both terms to match against.
Education section — Lower weight
Lower weight for most roles, but critical for qualification-gated positions. If a role requires a specific degree subject or professional qualification, make sure the exact credential appears in full, correctly spelled.
Hard Skills vs Soft Skills: Where to Focus
Not all keywords carry equal weight in ATS scoring. In most systems, hard skills and technical competencies score significantly higher than soft skills. This is because hard skills are verifiable, unambiguous, and directly tied to job requirements — whereas soft skills like "communication" and "leadership" are generic and appear on nearly every CV regardless of role.
This does not mean soft skills should be absent. Some ATS configurations do score for behavioural competencies, and recruiters reading past the automated screen will look for them. But if you are working through a list of keywords to integrate and need to prioritise, start with the hard skills, tool names, and qualifications. Those move the needle most.
How Many Keywords Is Enough — and What Is Too Many
There is no universal target number, because it depends on the length of the job description and the complexity of the role. A reasonable heuristic: if you have integrated the top 10–15 most important keywords from the job description into your CV naturally, you are in good shape. If you are forcing in 40 keywords at the expense of readable prose, you have gone too far.
Keyword stuffing — repeating the same term five times, hiding white text keywords, or including a keyword list invisible to the reader — used to work with older ATS systems. Modern systems penalise it. More importantly, the human reviewer who reads your CV after it clears automated screening will notice immediately if the document reads unnaturally.
The goal is natural integration: every keyword appears in a real sentence describing real experience, in the right section, at a density that improves your score without degrading readability. For more on formatting and structural mistakes that undermine ATS performance, see the guide to ATS resume mistakes.
A Note for Career Changers
If you are applying for roles outside your current field, keyword alignment is both more difficult and more important. Your CV is written in the language of your old industry; the job description is written in the language of the new one. The gap between them directly affects your ATS score.
The same process applies — read the job description, extract the key terms, check your coverage, integrate what you legitimately hold — but the reframing step requires more attention. For a full guide to handling this, see the article on writing a career change resume.
Using AI Tools to Find Keywords Faster
AI writing tools can accelerate the keyword extraction process. If you paste a job description into ChatGPT and ask it to identify the top 10–15 ATS keywords, it will give you a useful starting list in seconds. The ChatGPT prompts for resume writing article includes specific prompts for this task.
The limitation is the same one that applies to all AI-assisted CV work: ChatGPT can help you identify and integrate keywords, but it cannot score the resulting document against an ATS, tell you whether your coverage is sufficient to clear the threshold, or iterate on the CV until it reaches the optimal result.
resum8 handles the scoring and iteration automatically. It generates your CV based on your experience and the target job description, evaluates it against an ATS scoring model, identifies where keyword coverage or phrasing falls short, and revises until the score reaches its highest achievable result.
For a role where you are a strong candidate on paper, the difference between a well-keyworded CV and a poorly keyworded one is often the difference between getting an interview and not hearing back at all. That is the gap resum8 is built to close.
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Try resum8 FreeFrequently Asked Questions
What are ATS keywords?
ATS keywords are the specific words and phrases that applicant tracking systems look for when scanning a CV. They include hard skills, tool names, qualifications, job-specific terminology, and sometimes soft skills. CVs that contain enough of the right keywords score higher and are more likely to reach human review.
How do I find the right ATS keywords for a job?
Read the job description carefully and extract the specific terms, tools, qualifications, and phrases that appear in the requirements and responsibilities sections. Terms that appear more than once are highest priority. Cross-referencing two or three similar job descriptions from different employers reveals the core keywords for the role type.
Where should I put ATS keywords in my resume?
In your professional summary, work experience bullet points, and skills section — in that order of priority. Keywords should appear in natural sentences describing real experience, not as a standalone list hidden from view.
How many keywords should be in a resume?
There is no fixed number, but integrating the top 10–15 keywords from the job description naturally throughout your CV is a strong baseline. The goal is sufficient coverage without keyword stuffing, which modern ATS systems can detect.
Can I use synonyms instead of exact keywords?
Sometimes, but not reliably. Some ATS systems use semantic matching and recognise synonyms; others match exact strings only. Where possible, use the same phrasing as the job description. If a term can be expressed multiple ways, include both forms where they fit naturally.
Do soft skills count as ATS keywords?
They can, but they score lower than hard skills and technical terms in most systems. Focus on integrating hard skills, tool names, and qualifications first. Soft skills like "stakeholder management" or "cross-functional collaboration" are worth including, but they are not the primary driver of ATS score.