ATS Keywords: How to Find the Right Ones and Where to Put Them

Keyword advice for CVs is usually delivered as an instruction to sprinkle. Take the job advert, find the important sounding words, scatter them through your document, watch your application rate improve. Most people try it, nothing changes, and they file keywords under things the internet lies about.

The instruction is not wrong so much as backwards. Keywords are not a scoring mechanism you feed. They are what a recruiter types into a search box when they have 400 applications and two hours. Understanding that one difference changes which words you pick, how many you need, and where they go.

If you want the underlying mechanics first, they are set out in what an applicant tracking system actually is. This article is about the practical work.

What a keyword actually is

A keyword is a term someone might reasonably search for to find a person who can do this job. That is the whole definition, and it rules out most of what people paste into their CVs.

It is usually a noun or a noun phrase. A tool, a technology, a qualification, a method, a domain, a job title. "Kubernetes", "IFRS", "ACCA", "supply chain planning", "paediatric nursing", "Salesforce administrator".

It is almost never an adjective about your character. Nobody searches a candidate database for "hardworking" or "detail-oriented", because every candidate would match and the result would be useless. Those words survive on CVs purely out of habit, and they are covered among the other things worth deleting in common CV mistakes to avoid.

It is also rarely a verb. Recruiters do not search for "managed" or "delivered". Verbs do important work for the human who reads afterwards, which is a separate job discussed in CV action verbs, but they are not what gets you into the result set.

Where the keywords actually live in a job advert

The advert is the source, but not all of it carries equal weight. Read it in this order.

The job title. The single most searched term, and the most commonly ignored. If the advert says "Management Accountant" and your CV says "Finance Business Partner", you have a mismatch on the most obvious search term there is. You do not have to lie about your title. You can write your real title and put the target title alongside it, or in your summary, or as the first line of the role description.

The first three bullets of the requirements list. Adverts are usually written in descending order of importance, because whoever wrote it listed the things that were on their mind first. What appears at the top is what the hiring manager actually cares about.

Anything repeated. If "stakeholder management" appears in the summary, the responsibilities and the requirements, it is not filler. Repetition in an advert is the closest thing you get to the hiring manager underlining something.

Anything with a number attached. "Three years of experience with", "manages a team of five", "portfolio of 200 accounts". These tell you the scale they expect and give you the vocabulary to describe your own.

The essential versus desirable split. Where an advert separates these, treat the essential list as compulsory vocabulary and the desirable list as optional. Most people over invest in proving the desirable items they happen to have and under invest in the essential ones they consider obvious.

What you can largely skip: the company boilerplate, the diversity statement, the description of the benefits, and the paragraph about the company's mission. These contain plenty of impressive nouns and none of them are search terms for the role.

A method that takes fifteen minutes

Do this with one advert, not ten. Keywords are per application.

Step one. Copy the advert into a plain document. Delete the company description, the benefits and the legal boilerplate. What remains is usually half the original length and all of the signal.

Step two. Underline every noun phrase that names a skill, tool, qualification, process or domain. Do not judge yet, just mark them. A typical advert yields twenty to thirty.

Step three. Sort them into three piles. Things you have done and can evidence. Things you have touched but could not defend in an interview. Things you have never done.

Step four. The first pile is your keyword list. It is usually between eight and fifteen terms, and that is enough. The second pile you may mention only where it is genuinely honest, for example a tool you used briefly under supervision. The third pile you leave out entirely, and if the third pile contains most of the essential requirements, the honest conclusion is that this is the wrong advert rather than the wrong CV.

Step five. For each term in pile one, find the place in your CV where you already describe doing that thing, and check whether the advert's word appears there. Usually you have described the work using different vocabulary. That is the edit: not adding new claims, but relabelling true ones in the reader's language.

That last step is the entire technique, and it is why this is a rewriting exercise rather than a padding exercise. The full workflow for a single application is in tailoring your CV to a job description.

Synonyms, and why they cost you

The same job is described differently by different employers, and the search only matches what is written.

Some examples of pairs that mean the same thing to a human and nothing to a search box: customer success and account management. Procurement and purchasing. People operations and human resources. Software developer and software engineer. Management accounts and internal reporting. Learning and development and training.

Three rules for handling this.

Use the advert's term as the primary. If they say procurement, say procurement, even if your company called it purchasing.

Carry both where it is natural. "Purchasing (procurement) for three manufacturing sites" is honest, readable and matches both searches. Do not do this for every term or the CV becomes unreadable.

Spell out abbreviations once, with both forms. "Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)", "search engine optimisation (SEO)", "profit and loss (P&L)". One line, both searches covered, and it reads as normal writing rather than a trick.

There is also a regional dimension. Applying across countries means the term itself changes, not just the phrasing. A CV going to Germany that says "Wirtschaftsprüfer" is searched for differently than one going to the UK saying "auditor". Match the destination market.

Where the words go

Placement matters more than frequency, because the two things that read your CV read different parts of it.

In the professional summary at the top. Three or four of your strongest terms, in a sentence rather than a list. This is the first thing a human reads and it is dense enough to matter. Examples of how this reads well are in professional summary examples.

Inside your experience bullets. This is the most important location by a wide margin, because a term here is attached to evidence. "Rebuilt the demand forecasting model in SQL, cutting stockouts by 18%" contains two searchable terms and proves both of them. A skills list contains the same words and proves nothing.

In a skills section, as a backstop. Useful for tools and technologies that would be awkward to work into prose, and useful because it is the section a parser reads most cleanly. Keep it to real capabilities, grouped, without proficiency bars. What belongs there is set out in what to include in a CV skills section.

In your job titles where it is honest. "Analyst (Data Analyst)" when your internal title was vague is legitimate. Inventing a seniority you did not hold is not.

Not in the header or footer. Content there is frequently dropped during parsing, so anything you place in that area may not exist as far as the search is concerned.

Not in white text, hidden boxes, or a paragraph of terms at the end. This is worth being blunt about. The parser will read it, so it "works" in the narrow sense. Then a human opens the document, selects the text or converts it, and sees the trick. You have not gamed a machine, you have handed a person a reason to distrust everything else on the page.

How many is enough

There is no target density, and anyone giving you a percentage is inventing it. The useful test is coverage rather than count.

Take the essential requirements from the advert. For each one, ask whether a reader could point at a specific line in your CV that demonstrates it. If the answer is yes for most of them, you are done. Adding the same word a fourth time changes nothing, because a search is a yes or no on presence, not a tally.

This is also why very long CVs are not better for keywords. A third page of weak material does not improve your match, it just dilutes the reader's attention across more text, as covered in how long a CV should be.

When you do not have the keywords

Sometimes the honest audit leaves you short. Two situations, two different answers.

You have the capability but not under that name. Common for career changers and for people from smaller organisations where one person did four jobs. The fix is translation. Running the rota, the ordering and the supplier relationships at a small shop is operations management, and describing it in the language of the target field is not dishonest. This is the whole problem addressed in writing a career change CV.

You genuinely do not have it. Then leave it out. Adding a term you cannot defend gets you into a search result and then into an interview where the first technical question ends the conversation. The cost of being found for the wrong thing is not zero: it is a wasted afternoon for both parties and a note on your record at a company you might want to apply to properly later.

For early career applicants where the gap is experience rather than skill, coursework, projects and volunteering carry real keywords, which is the approach in writing a CV with no work experience.

A worked example

An advert for a Marketing Executive lists: campaign management, email marketing, Google Analytics, copywriting, B2B, HubSpot, budget management, three years of experience.

Here is a bullet before any keyword work:

Responsible for running our marketing activity and reporting on results.

True, invisible to every search on that list, and it tells the reader nothing.

Here it is rewritten, with the terms attached to evidence rather than sprinkled:

Ran end to end B2B campaigns across email and paid social, managing a 40,000 annual budget in HubSpot and reporting performance in Google Analytics.

Wrote and tested email copy for a 12,000 contact list, lifting click through from 1.8% to 3.1% over eight months.

Six of the eight terms now appear, each one sitting in a sentence that proves it. Nothing was invented. The work was always this, it was simply described in the candidate's internal vocabulary instead of the market's.

Note what the rewrite also did: it added numbers. Keywords get you found, and the numbers are what make a person keep reading once you are.

The keywords nobody tells you to check

Three categories sit outside the skills list and get missed constantly, even by people who do the advert analysis properly.

Job titles from your past roles. Recruiters frequently search for the title they are hiring for, expecting to find people already doing it elsewhere. If your previous employer used an internal title like "Business Partner II" or "Associate, Grade 4", that title matches nothing. Writing the recognised equivalent alongside it, "Business Partner II (Management Accountant)", is honest and makes you findable.

Industry and sector. Employers often want someone who already understands their domain, so they search for it: "insurance", "public sector", "FMCG", "SaaS", "manufacturing". Many CVs name the employer without ever naming the industry, which is invisible to anyone who does not already know that company. One clause after the employer name fixes it: "Northgate Ltd, a 200 person logistics business".

Certifications in the form people search for. Qualifications get searched by their abbreviation more often than their full name, and sometimes by the awarding body. Listing "PRINCE2 Practitioner" beats "project management certification", and including the year signals it is current.

There is also a class of term that is genuinely worth ignoring, despite appearing in nearly every advert: the soft skill nouns. "Communication skills", "teamwork", "problem solving". These are not searched for in practice because they do not discriminate between candidates. Claiming them costs you a line and proves nothing. Demonstrating them inside a bullet about work you did costs no extra space and is the only version a reader believes.

Frequently asked questions

How many keywords should my CV have?

Cover the essential requirements from the advert and stop. That is usually eight to fifteen terms for a given application. There is no density percentage worth chasing.

Should I repeat the same keyword several times?

No benefit. A search matches on presence, not frequency. Repeating a term two or three times naturally across a document is fine, engineering it is a waste of space.

Do I need to change my CV for every application?

For the roles you actually want, yes, and the change is usually fifteen minutes of adjusting your summary and a handful of bullets. A generic CV sent to fifty employers reliably performs worse than ten tailored ones.

Do keywords matter if a small company reads every CV by hand?

Less, but the words still work on the human. A reader scanning for the terms in their own advert finds them faster in a CV that uses those terms, and speed matters when they are on their fourth CV in ten minutes.

Is a skills section enough on its own?

It gets you matched but not chosen. A list of terms with no evidence behind them reads as claims, and an experienced reader discounts it accordingly. Use the list as a backstop, put the proof in the experience section.

What about keywords for LinkedIn?

The same logic applies, with the difference that a LinkedIn profile serves every search at once rather than one advert. That means picking the terms that describe the direction you want, not every job you have held.

See which terms actually came through

You can compare an advert to your CV by hand, but you cannot easily see what a machine extracted from your file, and that is the version being searched. CvLaunch reads your CV, shows you the skills, titles and sections it pulled out, and compares them against a job description so you can see which of the advert's terms are genuinely present and which you only think are there. It takes a few seconds, it is free, and there is no sign up.