Only some words are keywords
A recruiter searching a database searches for things a candidate either has or hasn't: a tool, a platform, a certification, a methodology, a job title, a language, a licence. Those are keywords. "Detail-oriented", "team player" and "results-driven" are not searched for by anyone, ever.
So read a posting looking specifically for nouns. Named technologies, named frameworks, named qualifications, named systems. Everything else in the posting is context for how to write, not vocabulary to match.
- Tools and platforms — Salesforce, Kubernetes, NetSuite, Epic
- Methodologies — Agile, Lean, MEDDICC, BPMN
- Certifications and licences — PMP, CPA, RN, Security+
- Domain terms — incident response, revenue recognition, TUPE
- Job titles, including the ones you'd call something else
Read the posting twice, for two different things
The first read is for the requirements list, which is where the hard filters live — years of experience, a specific certification, a named system. If you match those, the words should appear on your page in the posting's own form.
The second read is for repetition. Whatever a posting says three times is what the role is actually about, regardless of what the requirements section claims. If "stakeholder management" appears in the summary, the responsibilities and the requirements, that's the job, and your resume should answer it in the top third rather than in a skills list at the bottom.
Where a keyword counts, and where it's wasted
A term in a skills section proves nothing except that you know the word. The same term inside a bullet, attached to something you did with it, is evidence. Both get parsed; only one survives the human read that follows.
So the pattern that works is both: the term in your skills block so it's findable, and the term in a bullet so it's credible. "Kubernetes" in a list, and "migrated 14 services to EKS with no unplanned downtime" in the experience section. One matches the search, the other answers the interview question the search leads to.
Match the posting's exact form, then the variant
Recruiters search for strings, and strings don't reason. If the posting says "Search Engine Optimisation" and you wrote "SEO", a literal search may miss you. Write the acronym with its expansion once — "SEO (search engine optimisation)" — and both forms are on the page without repetition.
The same applies to titles. If your internal title was "Growth Ninja" and the market calls it "Performance Marketing Manager", put the recognisable title on the page. Nobody searches for a job title that only exists inside one company.
The honesty constraint is the whole limit
Every keyword on your resume is a question you've agreed to answer. That's the real ceiling on this technique, and it's why stuffing fails even when it works: you get the interview and then spend it being found out on a tool you used once.
The test is simple. For each term, could you talk for two minutes about something you did with it? If not, take it off. A resume with eight defensible keywords beats one with forty that collapse under a follow-up question.
What not to do
White text, hidden layers, keyword blocks behind images, and pasted chunks of the job description are all detectable, and all read as deception rather than as optimisation. The cost when found is not a lower ranking — it's a discarded application.
Repeating the same term eight times doesn't help either. Most systems don't weight frequency the way the folklore assumes, and the human reading afterwards notices immediately.