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Resume Keyword Matcher

Paste a job description and see which of its terms are missing from your resume, weighted by how often the posting repeats them.

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Your resume

Paste the text, or load it straight out of a PDF or Word file.

The job description

Paste the whole posting, repeated terms are weighted higher.

Do not paste the missing terms in as a list. Recruiters have seen it, and a block of unrelated keywords at the foot of a resume reads exactly like what it is. Work each term into the sentence describing what you actually did with it, that satisfies the search and survives the human reading it afterwards.

How recruiters actually find you

The mental model most candidates have is a robot reading their resume and scoring it. That is largely a myth. What actually happens is closer to a search engine: your resume is parsed into fields, those fields are indexed, and a recruiter with sixty applications and forty minutes types the two or three skills that matter most into a search box.

You are either in those results or you are not. There is no score, no threshold, and no rejection, just absence. This is why vocabulary matters so much more than it should: the search matches words, and a perfect description of the same work in different words does not match.

Repetition is the signal

Job descriptions are written by people, usually in a hurry, often by pasting from a previous one. The things that genuinely matter get mentioned more than once, in the summary, in the responsibilities, and again in the requirements. The nice-to-haves appear once, in a list.

So a term's repetition count is a decent proxy for how much the hiring manager cares, and this tool surfaces it rather than treating every word as equal. A term marked ×4 is worth restructuring a bullet point for. A term appearing once probably is not.

Tailoring without lying

There is a real line here, and it is worth being clear about which side of it to stand on.

Legitimate: using the employer's vocabulary for work you genuinely did. If you built reporting pipelines and the posting calls it "data engineering", use their term. If you managed relationships with senior internal customers and they call it "stakeholder management", use theirs. You are translating, not inventing.

Not legitimate: adding a skill you do not have because it appeared in the missing list. It will surface in the first technical conversation, and the cost of being caught is far higher than the cost of not matching a keyword.

The honest use of a list of missing terms is as a prompt: for each one, ask whether you have done something that the employer would recognise under that name. Often you have, and simply called it something else.

Do this after the parsing works

Keyword coverage is worth nothing if the resume does not parse. A two-column layout scrambles your text before any search runs against it, and no amount of keyword tuning fixes that.

So run the ATS checker first and clear anything it flags as a blocker. Then come back here and tune the vocabulary against the specific posting. In that order, both steps are worth doing; in the reverse order, the second is wasted.

Frequently asked questions

How are the terms chosen?

From the job description itself, ranked by how often it repeats each one. A posting that says "SQL" four times is telling you something a posting that mentions it once is not. Filler words are dropped, and two-word phrases are kept together where the posting repeats them, "project management" means something its two halves do not.

Why does it say a term is missing when I clearly have that skill?

Because it matches the words, not the meaning, and so does the recruiter's search box. If the posting says "stakeholder management" and you wrote "worked closely with senior leadership", a keyword search for the former will not find you. The fix is to use the posting's own phrasing where it honestly describes what you did.

What coverage should I aim for?

There is no threshold that guarantees anything, and any tool quoting one is inventing it. As a rule of thumb, under 40% suggests you are describing the same work in different vocabulary, and it is worth a rewrite. Above about 70% you are into diminishing returns, and pushing higher starts to read like padding.

Should I just paste the missing keywords into my resume?

No. It is transparent to anyone who reads it, and increasingly to the software too, several systems now weight terms by whether they appear in context. Put each term inside the sentence describing what you did with it. That satisfies the search and survives the human reading afterwards, which a keyword block does not.

What about white text tricks?

Do not. Hiding keywords in white text or at one-point size is old, well known, and detected by parsers that read the text layer rather than the rendering. Being caught reads as dishonesty rather than cleverness, and it is a fast route to a permanent block at a company you wanted to work for.