PassTheBotOpen any job ad and you'll find three kinds of language mixed together: the company's mission and perks, the day-to-day responsibilities, and the requirements. Only the last two contain the words that get matched against your CV — and even there, some carry far more weight than others.
The four types of keyword
- Hard skills — tools, methods and qualifications: "Python", "Xero", "prince2", "forklift licence". These are matched most literally and matter most.
- Domain terms — the vocabulary of the field: "reconciliation", "clinical governance", "conversion rate". They prove you speak the language.
- Soft skills — "stakeholder management", "cross-functional". Real, but only credible when attached to an example.
- Titles — the role name itself. Matching the standard title of your last relevant role is one of the highest-value moves you can make.
How to extract them, fast
Read the "Requirements" and "Responsibilities" sections and mark every noun that names a skill, tool, method or qualification. Ignore the mission statement and the perks. When a term is repeated, or sits under a "must have" or "essential" heading, weight it — the employer has told you it's a gate.
A quick tell: if you removed a phrase and the job would still make sense to a stranger, it's probably not a keyword. If removing it makes the role ambiguous, it is.
Where to place them
Placement changes how much a keyword counts, and how believable it reads to a human:
- Your professional summary — the two or three that define your fit, up top where both machine and recruiter see them first.
- Your experience bullets — the rest, embedded in the achievement that proves them. This is where a keyword earns its credibility.
- A skills line — for hard skills and tools the parser can lift cleanly as discrete terms.
Avoid the "key skills" block of thirty comma-separated words with nothing behind them. Systems increasingly discount unsupported skill lists, and recruiters have learned to ignore them entirely.
How many is enough
There's no magic percentage. Aim to cover every essential requirement you genuinely meet, plus the majority of the preferred ones. If a job lists eight core skills and your CV credibly demonstrates six or seven of them, you're in strong shape. Chasing the eighth by claiming something you can't back up costs you more than the match is worth.
PassTheBot pulls the scored terms out of any posting automatically and shows you, in red, the exact requirements missing from your CV — so you're never guessing which words matter.