Match Resume Keywords to a Job Posting

You read a job posting, you know you can do the job, and your resume never uses the posting's words for it. The posting says "dashboards" five times; your resume says "reporting". A person reading will probably forgive that. A search filter or a hurried recruiter may not. The Resume Keyword Matcher compares your resume with a posting and lists which of the posting's repeated words and phrases your resume already uses and which it leaves out.

Be clear about what it is. It counts words and two-word phrases. It does not rate your writing, it does not know how any employer's software ranks resumes, and it cannot tell you whether you are qualified. It is a reminder to look at wording, and the decisions stay with you.

How to use it

Paste the full job posting in the left box and your resume as plain text in the right box. Nothing needs uploading: the comparison is done by the page on your own device as you type. The results appear once both boxes have text and update with every edit.

You see:

• Keyword coverage, as a percentage.
• A list Not in your resume, shown as amber chips.
• A list Already in your resume, shown as green chips.
• On each chip, two numbers: how many times the posting uses the term, and how many times your resume does. A chip reading 3/0 means the posting says it three times and your resume never does.
• A Copy report button that puts the coverage and both lists into a plain-text note.

Two notes appear when the input is thin. If the posting is under about 40 words it says so, and if your resume is under about 100 words it asks you to paste all of it, not one section.

What counts as a keyword

The tool lowercases the text, splits it into words, ignores common filler words and a list of words that appear in almost every posting (such as "experience" or "candidate"), and ignores bare numbers. It then counts single words and two-word phrases. A phrase is only kept if the posting uses it at least twice. Up to 40 terms are listed, most repeated first.

It tries to treat variations as the same thing. Words are reduced to a rough root, so "managing", "managed" and "managers" are close enough to meet. Some well-known skills are folded together before counting: "Power BI" and "PowerBI", "A/B testing" and "split testing", "SEO" and "search engine optimization", "KPIs" and "key performance indicators", "CRM", "project management", "machine learning", "AWS", "Google Cloud" and a few others. Symbols stay inside words, so C++, C#, Node.js and CI/CD are kept whole.

Coverage is the share of the posting's keyword weight that your resume also uses. Each term counts at most five times, so a word repeated twenty times cannot swamp the rest.

A worked example

We wrote a short sample posting for a marketing analyst and a sample resume for a person called Alex Rivera. The posting asks for dashboards in Power BI, SQL, A/B tests, data analysis, work with stakeholders, Google Analytics and SEO reporting. The resume mentions Tableau, SQL, split tests, Google Analytics, campaigns and reporting.

The tool listed 40 terms and reported 44 percent coverage, with a note that the resume was a little short. The results, with the posting count first:

• Not in the resume included: dashboards 3/0, stakeholders 3/0, campaign data 2/0, data analysis 1/0, Power BI 1/0 and SEO 1/0, along with weaker words such as clear, build, run and write.
• Already in the resume included: campaign 4/2, marketing analyst 2/1, reporting 2/2, sql 2/3, A/B testing 1/1, analytics 1/2, Google 1/2 and communication 1/1.

Read what this shows. "A/B testing" was found even though Alex wrote "split tests", because the tool folds those forms together. "Dashboards" and "stakeholders" are missing and each appears three times in the posting, which is worth a look. "Power BI" is missing because Alex uses Tableau, and the honest response is to leave it out: Tableau is a related skill, not the same one. "SEO" is missing, but Alex wrote "organic search performance", and the tool does not know that these mean the same thing. That gap is a wording choice Alex can decide on. And words like "build", "run" and "clear" are noise: the list includes single words from the posting even when they appear only once, so treat it as a list to scan rather than a to-do list.

Deciding what to change

Go through the "Not in your resume" list and sort each item into one of three bins.

1. True and missing. You did the work but described it differently. Alex built weekly reporting that was, in practice, a dashboard, and presented to stakeholders. Change the wording where the work is described, for example "weekly dashboards in Tableau for paid media stakeholders". Use the posting's phrase, not a near synonym, as the tool's own tip says.
2. True but minor. Do not force it in. If a keyword fits no honest sentence, leave it.
3. Not true. Leave it out. Adding a skill you do not have gets found out in the interview, and it can end an offer.

Then put keywords where the work belongs, in a job's bullets, not in a block of invisible or repeated words. A resume should read well to a person first.

Limits worth knowing

The matcher compares exact words and roots, so it will not see that "organic search" and "SEO" mean the same, or that "led a team of six" shows management. It cannot read formatting, tables or images, so paste the text. It ignores numbers, so it will not check that your achievements are specific. A high coverage figure is not a promise of anything, and a low one is not a verdict: Alex's 44 percent was partly noise from filler words in a sample posting. Use it per posting, because every posting gives a different list.

Steps

1. Copy the whole job posting, not a summary, into the left box.
2. Paste your whole resume as plain text into the right box, so the short-resume note does not appear.
3. Read the amber chips with the highest posting counts first.
4. For each, decide whether it is true, minor or not true.
5. Rewrite a bullet in the job it belongs to, using the posting's own wording where it is accurate.
6. Paste the updated resume again and check the new coverage, then stop. Past a point you are tuning to a list, not improving your resume.
7. Use Copy report if you want a record of what you changed for each application.

Resume Keyword Matcher is a Professional Tool with 10 trial uses a day. You can read the results for free; the Copy report button is the action that uses one trial use per visit.

Related tools

If you need to write or reformat the resume itself, Resume Builder makes a clean resume you can export, and there is a walk-through in build a resume. To check the length of your resume and of the posting, Word Counter counts words as you type.

Common mistakes

Chasing 100 percent coverage. Adding skills you do not have. Pasting only one section of the resume. Pasting a summary of the posting instead of the posting. Using one tailored resume for every application.

Summary

Paste the posting and your resume, scan the amber chips with the most mentions, change the wording only where the work is honestly yours, and stop. Open the Resume Keyword Matcher with your next application. More business tools are in the business tools category.

Open the Resume Keyword Matcher→

What would help you most: a cleaner list, or a per-section view? Tell us on the contact page.