Updated September 7, 2026
Keywords: how to find them in a job ad and where to put them
A recruiter searching their database types four or five words. The whole game is being findable by those words without writing a CV that reads as if it were assembled by a machine.
Job adverts are written by the person who will manage the role, then edited by somebody in recruitment. That gives them a reliable structure: a paragraph of context nobody reads, a list of responsibilities that describes the work, and a list of requirements that describes the filter. The keywords live in the last two, and almost never in the first.
The mistake is to treat all of those terms as equal and shovel them in. A CV containing every requirement verbatim is easy to spot and, worse, easy to disprove in the first ten minutes of an interview. The terms worth taking are the ones you can defend.
Sort the advert into three piles
Read the requirements and put each term into one of three piles: things you have done, things you have touched, and things you have not. The first pile goes into the experience section, in a sentence about when you did it. The second goes into the skills section, honestly. The third stays out of the CV entirely and goes into the cover letter, if anywhere, as something you are willing to learn.
- Nouns beat verbs: a recruiter searches for the tool, the standard or the qualification, not for managed.
- A requirement repeated in both lists is the one the role is really about.
- Ignore the culture paragraph. Nobody has ever searched a database for passionate.
Place them where they are believable
The same word carries different weight in different parts of the page. In a skills list it is a claim; in a bullet about a project, with a date and an outcome around it, it is evidence. Search engines inside an ATS do not usually weigh position, but the human who reads the result does, and they are the one who decides.
Two or three of the advert’s key terms in the summary at the top is usually right, because that is the block a human reads first. Beyond three it starts to read like an echo of the advert, which is exactly what it is.
- Write both the abbreviation and the full form once each, then use whichever reads better.
- Use the advert’s own noun rather than your employer’s internal name for the same thing.
- Never put a term in the skills list that appears nowhere in your experience: that is the gap an interviewer opens with.
The tricks that stopped working
White text on a white background, a block of keywords behind an image, a repeated term in a one-point font: all of these are extracted as ordinary text, all of them are visible the moment anybody looks at the parsed record, and all of them read as an attempt to deceive rather than as a formatting quirk.
- Hidden text is extracted exactly like visible text; hiding it hides it from you, not from the software.
- A skills section of sixty terms scores no better and reads as a person with no priorities.
- Copying whole phrases from the advert is noticed, because the person reading wrote them.
The honest version of keyword optimisation is simply describing your own work in the words your industry uses, and choosing which parts of it to put first. That survives both the search and the interview.
Put it into practice