Resume keyword scanner
for any job description.

Read for weight, not for nouns. A posting tells you what it cares about through three signals: position, repetition, and framing. Anything in the first two paragraphs outranks anything in the final bullet list. Anything mentioned three times outranks something mentioned once. Anything under “required” outranks anything under “nice to have”, even when the nice-to-have sounds more impressive. Once you have that ranking, the keyword set falls out of it: the specific technologies, tools, certifications, methodologies and job-title nouns attached to the highest-weighted requirements. Ignore the generic filler — “fast-paced environment”, “team player”, “wear many hats” — which appears in every posting and therefore distinguishes nothing. What you want is the short list of terms that, if absent from your resume, would make a recruiter searching the applicant database fail to find you.

Yes, but for a different reason than you have been told. Modern applicant tracking systems do handle stemming and synonyms, so the old advice about matching a phrase letter for letter is mostly obsolete. Keywords still matter because of how recruiters use the system: they run searches. Someone filling a role types the two or three terms they care about into the database and works through whoever comes back. If your resume describes the same work in vocabulary nobody searches for, you are technically in the database and practically invisible. Keywords also matter for the five-second human skim, where familiar terms in familiar places let a reader place you quickly. So use the posting's words where your experience genuinely supports them — and only there. A keyword you cannot defend in an interview is worse than a keyword you do not have.

Enough to cover the top-ranked requirements, and no more. In practice that is five to ten terms, not thirty. The failure mode is not omission but saturation: a skills section that lists every technology in the posting reads as unfiltered, and a recruiter who has seen a thousand resumes can spot a copied requirements list instantly. It also dilutes the terms that matter — if everything is emphasised, nothing is. A better test than counting is placement. Does the most important keyword appear somewhere in the top third of the page, attached to something you actually did? If yes, you are done. If it appears only in a skills list at the bottom, move it up. To see which of these terms your resume already covers, run the same posting through the resume job description match score.