What are ATS keywords?

The specific words and phrases that an Applicant Tracking System (or the recruiter reading the parsed output) looks for in your CV. They come directly from the job posting — skills, qualifications, job titles, software names, and industry terminology. The closer your CV language mirrors the posting, the higher your match score.

Should I keyword-stuff my CV?

No. Adding keywords that don't reflect your actual experience is dishonest and will be obvious in an interview. The goal is natural integration: use the same language the posting uses for skills you genuinely have. A 'product manager' who lists 'PM' but never 'product manager' may be underselling themselves to an ATS that screens for the full phrase.

How many keywords do I need to include?

There's no magic number. Focus on the most important ones — typically the skills and qualifications listed in the 'Requirements' section of the posting. Those appear multiple times in the posting for a reason. Secondary nice-to-haves are worth including but shouldn't crowd out primary terms.

2026-09-01 · Daniel Zambrano

The Keywords You're Missing (And How to Find Them for Free)

Keyword matching is simpler than the ATS-optimization industry wants you to believe. You don’t need a paid tool, a subscription service, or a certification to do this well — you need a job description, a text document, and 20 minutes. Here’s the exact process.

There’s a whole cottage industry built around “ATS optimization,” and most of it is noise. The core concept, though, is real: Applicant Tracking Systems score your CV against the job description using keyword matching, and a low score means a human may never see your application. Missing keywords cost you interviews. It’s that concrete.

The good news is that fixing it doesn’t require specialized software. Here’s what you need to know and how to do it manually, for free, right now.

Why keywords matter more than you think

When you submit an application through a company’s careers portal or a job board, it almost certainly passes through an ATS first. The software parses your CV, extracts text, and compares it to the job description — looking for matches on skills, qualifications, job titles, and role-specific language.

Applications that score below a threshold get filtered out. The hiring manager never sees them. If you’re genuinely qualified for a role but your CV uses different language than the job description — “customer experience” instead of “customer success,” or “budget management” instead of “P&L ownership” — you can fail a keyword screen on a role you’re a strong fit for.

Beyond automated filtering, recruiters also run keyword searches directly. When a company receives 400 applications, the recruiter might search the database for “AHPRA” to find registered nurses, “Workday” to find HRIS-experienced candidates, “Xero” to find bookkeepers, or “WHS” to find safety-qualified candidates. If the term isn’t in your CV, you don’t appear in the search — even if you have the experience.

Hard skills vs. soft skills keywords

Not all keywords are equal, and understanding the difference helps you prioritize.

Hard skills keywords are specific, verifiable, and carry the most weight in automated scoring. These are tool names, credentials, methodologies, and role-specific terms. The list looks different in every field — but the logic is identical:

Tech and project roles: Salesforce, JIRA, Python, SQL, AWS, Agile, PMP, SOC 2
Healthcare and clinical: AHPRA registration, triage, ICD-10 coding, clinical governance, patient safety, Epic EMR, medication management
Finance and accounting: IFRS, CPA, MYOB, Xero, payroll reconciliation, AML compliance, financial modelling, audit
HR and people & culture: Workday, HRIS, talent acquisition, ER case management, EBA interpretation, onboarding, workforce planning
Education: curriculum design, NAPLAN, differentiated instruction, pastoral care, ASDAN, IB curriculum, learning support
Trades and construction: WHS legislation, AS/NZS standards, AutoCAD, site induction, SWMS, risk assessment, CITB card

Whatever your field: if a job description lists these as requirements and they’re not in your CV, you will score poorly. Full stop.

Soft skills keywords matter too, but in a different way. Terms like “cross-functional collaboration,” “stakeholder management,” “executive communication,” and “team leadership” are used by recruiters when they search for candidates at certain seniority levels. They carry less automated weight but signal level and fit to a human reader. Include the ones that genuinely apply to you.

The mistake is assuming soft skills keywords don’t matter at all, or that hard skills are the only thing worth optimizing. Both contribute to your overall match score. The job description usually tells you which ones the employer cares about most — whatever appears multiple times is a priority signal.

The free manual process — five steps

This is the actual process. It takes 20 minutes if you’re focused.

Step 1: Copy the full job description into a text document. The whole thing — not just the requirements section. The intro paragraph about the company, the responsibilities section, the qualifications, the “nice to have” list. All of it. Job descriptions repeat their most important terms, and capturing the full text ensures you catch every repetition.

Step 2: Highlight every skill, tool, qualification, and role-specific phrase. Go through the document and mark anything that represents a specific capability or requirement. That includes named software, technical skills, credentials, methodologies, industry terms, and job-title-adjacent phrases. Don’t edit as you go — just identify.

Step 3: Group by essential vs. nice-to-have. Essential terms are ones that appear more than once, appear in the requirements section (not just “preferred”), or are clearly the core of the role. Nice-to-haves are the terms that only show up in the “bonus points” section or appear once in passing. Focus your optimization effort on the essentials first.

Step 4: Check which ones are already in your CV — and whether you’re using the same language. This is where most of the gap lives. You might have the experience, but if you called it something different, you won’t match. Open your CV alongside your keyword list. For each essential keyword: is it there? Does it use the same phrasing, or a synonym that an ATS might not recognize as equivalent?

Step 5: Update your CV to include the missing ones naturally. This is not about stuffing your CV with keywords. It’s about making sure the language you use accurately reflects the language of the role. If you managed budgets and the job description says “P&L ownership” — and that’s genuinely what you did — use their phrase. If they want “Agile delivery” and you worked in Agile teams, say so explicitly. Accuracy and alignment, not fabrication.

Common mistakes

A few traps are worth naming explicitly because they’re surprisingly common.

Keyword stuffing. Listing keywords in a block of text at the bottom of your CV, or repeating them an unnatural number of times, used to work on older ATS systems. Modern platforms — and definitely human readers — penalize it. Keywords should appear in context, within your experience bullets and summary.

White text tricks. Hiding keywords in white text on a white background was a thing. ATS systems now detect this, and if a recruiter spots it, your application is immediately disqualified. Don’t do it. It’s also unnecessary — the honest approach works fine.

Ignoring acronyms and their expansions. “PM” and “Project Manager” are not always treated as equivalent by ATS software. If the job description uses both the abbreviation and the full phrase, include both in your CV. Same applies to “CRM” vs. “Customer Relationship Management,” “SEO” vs. “Search Engine Optimization,” and so on. When in doubt, use both forms at least once.

Optimizing for one version of the job title. If you’re applying for roles that might be called “Product Manager,” “Product Owner,” or “Product Lead,” make sure your CV reflects whichever term each specific employer uses. Tailor per application, not once for every application.

Where QuillCV fits in

Everything described in the five steps above is what QuillCV does automatically for every application. You paste in the job description and upload your existing CV. Our system identifies the essential keywords, checks which are present in your CV and which are missing, and generates a tailored version that incorporates the relevant terms naturally — within your actual experience, not stuffed at the bottom of the document.

The manual process is free and genuinely works. QuillCV does the same work faster, without the spreadsheet, and without missing the acronym variants.

The keywords were always in the job description. Most people just never read it that carefully.