Resume keywords by job: what 93 real postings actually ask for
Which resume keywords to use for five common jobs, counted in the requirements of 93 real postings, plus how to find the ones that matter in any ad.
Most lists of resume keywords are long and unsourced. You get hundreds of words sorted by industry, and no way of telling which ones employers actually ask for. So we counted. On October 1, 2026 we pulled 118 live postings for five common jobs from public company job boards and isolated the requirements section of each one.
This article gives you the result for each job, shows where the keywords that matter sit in an ad, and lists the spelling details that make a keyword match or miss. How an applicant tracking system reads your resume is covered in our guide to ATS filters, so it is not repeated here.
Repeated is not the same as required
The usual advice is to look for the words an ad repeats, since repetition signals priority. It sounds right. We checked it, and it holds less often than you would think.
A job posting is mostly not requirements. We could isolate the requirements block in 93 of them, the section headed "qualifications", "what you'll bring" or "about you". It was a median of 168 words out of 849. The rest is the company pitch, the team description, benefits, pay ranges, equal-opportunity text and anti-scam warnings. Those parts repeat words too.
29 of 93
and requirements are a median 168 of 849 words
postings where the skill or tool the ad repeats most never appears in its requirements section. Counting repeats over the whole ad would have sent you after the wrong word.
Source: HiredFolio count of 93 postings from 29 companies on public Greenhouse job boards, October 2026
Two examples show how it happens:
- "Recruiter" or "recruiting" appeared in 37 of the 93 postings and in the requirements of exactly one. The others were lines like "Talk to your recruiter for more information" (DoorDash) or warnings that "Scammers sometimes impersonate Twilio recruiters". Our own keyword extractor counted those as a skill.
- "AI" appeared in 73 of the 93 postings but in the requirements of 40. In the rest it was company copy or a hiring disclaimer, such as Twilio's "We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient."
So the rule is narrower than the usual advice. Count repeats inside the requirements block, and treat a word that only repeats in the company pitch as context, not a keyword. If the ad splits "required" from "preferred" or "nice to have", the required list comes first.
Resume keywords by job, counted from 93 real postings
Here is what the requirements sections of those postings asked for, job by job. "In requirements" counts postings whose requirements block names the term. "Anywhere" counts the whole ad. A big gap between the two means the word is part of how the company talks, not what it screens for.
How we sampled: on October 1, 2026 we queried the public Greenhouse job-board API for 77 companies, 58 of which answered, and kept 118 postings for the five jobs. We took at most three postings per company per job and dropped duplicate titles. 93 postings from 29 companies had a requirements block we could isolate, and those are the ones counted here. The boards are mostly US and UK tech and fintech employers, so a hospital or a retailer will word things differently. Variants were counted together: "dashboards" and "data visualization" are one row. "Years of experience" is not a word to add. It means the ad sets a minimum, which the dates on your resume have to show.
Data analyst
17 postings, 12 companies.
| Keyword | In requirements | Anywhere |
|---|---|---|
| SQL | 16 | 17 |
| Communication | 13 | 16 |
| Years of experience | 13 | 14 |
| Dashboards, data visualization | 11 | 16 |
| Stakeholders | 8 | 13 |
| Degree | 8 | 8 |
| Python | 7 | 9 |
| Tableau | 7 | 9 |
| AI tools, LLMs | 7 | 15 |
| Looker | 6 | 9 |
| dbt | 5 | 7 |
| Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift or Databricks | 5 | 6 |
SQL is close to universal. Python is in fewer than half, and the BI tool varies by company, so name the one the ad names. Excel appeared in none of the 17 requirements blocks. That says more about these tech employers than about the job, so check the ad before you drop it.
Product manager
22 postings, 8 companies.
| Keyword | In requirements | Anywhere |
|---|---|---|
| Years of experience | 19 | 19 |
| Data, analytics | 16 | 22 |
| AI, ML, LLMs | 16 | 18 |
| Communication | 13 | 19 |
| Technical, engineering | 12 | 21 |
| SaaS, platform | 12 | 17 |
| Cross-functional | 9 | 13 |
| Experimentation, A/B testing | 8 | 9 |
| Strategy | 8 | 17 |
| Roadmap | 5 | 17 |
"Roadmap" is the clearest case of a word ads use but rarely require: it is in 17 postings and in the requirements of 5. Put it in your bullets, where it describes your work, rather than chasing it as a skill.
Account executive
16 postings, 8 companies.
| Keyword | In requirements | Anywhere |
|---|---|---|
| Closing, close deals | 10 | 15 |
| Prospecting | 8 | 12 |
| SaaS | 7 | 7 |
| Enterprise | 6 | 9 |
| Years of experience | 6 | 8 |
| Pipeline | 5 | 11 |
| Negotiation | 3 | 8 |
| Full sales cycle | 3 | 7 |
| New business | 3 | 14 |
| MEDDIC, MEDDPICC | 1 | 6 |
Sales ads name tools far less than you would expect. Salesforce was in the requirements of 1 posting out of 16, CRM in 2. What they screen for is the sales motion: closing, prospecting, and the segment you sold to.
Marketing manager
24 postings, 11 companies.
| Keyword | In requirements | Anywhere |
|---|---|---|
| Years of experience | 23 | 23 |
| Analytics, data | 15 | 22 |
| Cross-functional | 12 | 19 |
| B2B | 11 | 11 |
| Stakeholders | 11 | 15 |
| Campaigns | 9 | 15 |
| HubSpot, Marketo or Salesforce | 8 | 8 |
| Events | 8 | 14 |
| AI | 8 | 18 |
| Go-to-market | 7 | 10 |
B2B is a filter here: when an ad says it, it says it in the requirements. If your experience is B2B, write the three letters.
Customer success manager
14 postings, 8 companies. The smallest sample of the five, so read the ranks loosely.
| Keyword | In requirements | Anywhere |
|---|---|---|
| Years of experience | 14 | 14 |
| Stakeholders | 9 | 10 |
| Relationships | 9 | 13 |
| Technical | 9 | 10 |
| Customer success | 9 | 14 |
| Executive, C-level | 7 | 7 |
| AI | 6 | 8 |
| SaaS | 5 | 5 |
| Adoption | 2 | 10 |
| Retention, churn | 0 | 5 |
Adoption, renewals and churn fill the "what you'll do" part of these ads, then mostly vanish from the requirements. Use them to describe results, such as "raised product adoption across 40 accounts", and put the relationship and technical skills in the summary.
AI is a requirement now, outside engineering
40 of the 93 requirements blocks mention AI. That includes 16 of 22 product manager postings, 7 of 17 data analyst postings and 8 of 24 marketing manager postings. The wording is practical, not academic. A Stripe data analyst ad asks for "proficiency with AI tools to accelerate model development, analysis, and coding".
If you use AI tools at work, write down which ones and what for, in a bullet with a result. "Used ChatGPT to draft SQL for weekly reporting, cutting prep from a day to two hours" answers that requirement. A skills line that only says "AI" does not.
Any other job: count three postings yourself
No list covers your exact role in your city, and the ones above come from tech employers. The same method works for any job in about ten minutes:
- Open three current postings for the job title you want.
- In each one, copy only the requirements block, required and preferred.
- Paste each block into the free job description keyword extractor. It sorts what it finds into hard skills, tools, degrees and soft skills, and counts how often each comes back.
- Keep the terms that show up in at least two of the three blocks. That is your core list.
- Read the rest of each ad once for the tools it names in passing. They are worth a mention if you have used them.
Pasting only the requirements block is the point. Paste the whole ad and the extractor counts the company pitch and the footer as well, which is exactly where "recruiter" came from in our sample.
Spelling decides the match more often than you think
The posting's wording is the safe choice, as our ATS guide explains. We wanted to know which variants actually cost you a match. So we ran 26 keyword and resume pairs through the matcher behind our own ATS checker. It is built to forgive plurals, common acronyms and a few synonyms. On October 1, 2026, 12 pairs matched and 14 did not, one of them on purpose: Java is not JavaScript. One of those misses is fixed: since October 5, 2026, the matcher links "SEO" to "search engine optimization".
Plurals, brand names and common acronyms came through: "dashboards" matched "dashboard", "Microsoft Excel" matched "Excel", "key performance indicators" matched "KPI". The misses were the kind of difference a person would not notice.
Missed, then fixed the resume wording against the ad's
Missed by our matcher
Ad says "negotiation", resume only says "negotiated"
Ad says "optimization", resume says "optimisation"
Ad says "data quality", resume says "quality of data"
Ad says "CRM", resume says "customer relationship management"
Matched
"Negotiation" in the skills line, "negotiated" in the bullet
"Optimization", spelled the employer's way
"Data quality", in the ad's word order
"CRM (customer relationship management)"
Plurals and brand names are forgiving. Verb forms, word order and US or UK spelling are not.
Three habits follow from it, and none of them depends on our tool in particular:
- Write the noun once. Bullets use verbs ("negotiated", "managed", "analyzed"), ads use nouns ("negotiation", "management", "data analysis"). Put the noun form in your skills line or summary so both exist.
- Copy the ad's spelling, US or UK. A UK resume sent to a US posting says "optimisation" and "visualisation". Our matcher missed both. Switch to the employer's spelling for that application.
- Keep the ad's word order. "Data quality" and "quality of data" are the same idea and a different string.
Other tools may forgive more or less than ours. That is why the posting's own wording stays the default: it is the one form every matcher finds.
The five kinds of keyword to look for
Our extractor sorts keywords into the same groups a recruiter searches by. Reading an ad with them in mind makes the requirements block faster to scan:
- Hard skills. Methods and domains: SQL, prospecting, demand generation, financial modeling.
- Tools. Named products: Tableau, Salesforce, HubSpot, Figma, Jira.
- Degrees, certifications, licences. "Bachelor's in a quantitative field", PMP, CPA, a driving licence.
- Soft skills. Communication, stakeholder management, attention to detail. They count when the ad names them. Communication was in the requirements of 13 of 17 data analyst and 13 of 22 product manager postings. Show them in a result rather than listing them.
- The job title. Use the ad's exact title as your resume headline when it honestly describes what you do.
Action verbs help the recruiter reading the bullets, but they are rarely what anyone searches for. Choose them for clarity, not for the match.
Where they go and what to skip
Put the core terms in your headline and summary, then back each one up in a dated experience bullet with a number. A skills section helps the software find the term. The bullet is what convinces the person who reads it next. Our ATS guide has a worked example and the placement rules.
Leave out three things:
- Stuffing. A wall of forty skills reads as a keyword dump to the recruiter, who sees the extracted text in plain view.
- Hidden text. White-on-white keywords show up in that same extracted text.
- Skills you cannot defend. The ad's keyword gets you a call, then the interview checks it.
Check the match before you send
Two free tools do the counting for you. The job description keyword extractor reads a posting alone, in your browser, and lists the skills, tools, degrees and soft skills it asks for with how often each appears. Then the HiredFolio ATS checker compares your resume against the same posting and lists the keywords the ad asks for that your resume never says.
Key takeaways before your next application
Count keywords in the requirements block only, and ignore words that only repeat in the company pitch or the footer.
Build your core list from the terms that appear in at least two of three postings for the same job.
Match the ad's exact form: the noun as well as the verb, and its US or UK spelling.
Have a posting open? Check your resume against it for free and see which keywords are missing.
Read next
- The French CV format: what to change when you apply for a job in France, with a full example
Photo, one page, Bac+5, CEFR levels, the cover letter: what a US resume or UK CV must become to work in France, with a full annotated French CV example.
- The best free ATS resume checkers: 2026 comparison
An honest comparison of free ATS resume checkers and free resume reviews: what each costs, whether you need an account, what the score measures, and where a person reviews your resume for free.
- Is a Canva resume really ATS friendly?
We ran three layouts of the same resume through our own ATS text extractor and published the raw output: here is what software really reads in a Canva resume.