Resume Keywords by Job Title

The exact ATS keywords, tools, and certifications recruiters search for — organized by job title. Pick your role to see the hard skills, soft skills, and credentials to work into your resume.

What a keyword page actually contains

Each link below opens one job title. The page lists the terms that recur in real postings for that title — hard skills, tools and platforms, certifications and licences, and the softer phrases hiring teams reuse. The wording follows how employers write, so it matches what a recruiter types into a search box and what an applicant tracking system indexes when it files your application.

Treat a page as an inventory, not a target. Nobody carries sixty terms on a one-page resume, and padding one with skills you have not used is the fastest way to lose a screening call. The useful pass is narrower: read your role’s page, mark the terms that sit behind work you have genuinely done, then check whether your resume states them in the employer’s words rather than your last company’s internal vocabulary. “Owned the intake queue” and “managed the ticketing backlog in Zendesk” can describe the same year of work; only one of them is searchable.

Where a title-level list stops. Our study of 3,910 real job postings found that two postings sharing a job title name a median 25% of the same requirements, against 11.1% for postings with different titles. Sharing a title roughly doubles the overlap — and still leaves about three quarters of the next posting uncovered. A keyword page gets you the predictable quarter. The posting in front of you decides the rest.

Choosing the right page when your title does not match

Job titles drift between companies, so pick by the work rather than the label. A “Revenue Operations Analyst” will recognise more of their vocabulary on the Business Analyst page than on a sales page, and a “Platform Engineer” usually sits closer to Site Reliability Engineer than to a general developer page. If you are switching fields, open two pages — the role you are leaving and the role you are aiming at — and write down the terms that appear on both. Those overlapping terms are the transferable part of your background, and they are what belongs near the top of the resume.

A four-step pass over your resume

  1. Read the page and mark what is true. Skip the rest without guilt; a shorter honest list beats a long unsupportable one.
  2. Search your resume for each marked term. Use the find function rather than memory, which tends to be generous about what the document actually says.
  3. Rewrite, do not append. A missing term belongs inside a bullet that already describes the work, with a figure attached where you have one. A skills block stuffed with unattached nouns parses cleanly and still reads as filler to the human who opens the file next.
  4. Then move to the specific posting. The title-level work is finished at that point; the individual job is a separate pass.

How the free checker fits

These pages are deliberately static: they describe a job title, not a vacancy. The checker at /tailor/ covers the other half. You paste your resume and one job description, and it returns the must-have terms from that posting that are missing from your resume, seniority mismatches between what the posting asks for and what your resume claims, and the formatting choices that make parsers drop content. It runs on screen in seconds, with no account.

What you want to knowWhere to answer it
What does this field generally ask for?A role page above
Which terms should my resume own before I start applying?A role page above
What is missing for this specific posting?The free checker
Is my resume parsing cleanly?The free checker
How do I phrase the work once I know the terms?Bullet examples by job title

Looking for the other half? Browse resume bullet examples by job title.

Applying to a specific job?

Paste your resume and one specific job posting. You get the must-have terms from that posting that are literally missing from your resume, any seniority mismatch, and the formatting that makes parsers drop your content — free, on screen, in seconds.

Check your resume against that exact job →

CareerLift provides resume-optimization tools and examples for informational purposes only. No specific job, interview, or employment outcome is guaranteed. The example metrics shown are illustrative — replace them with your own verified results before use.