Keywords decide whether your CV is found and ranked. Learn where to find the right ones for any role, how to place them so they read naturally, and the mistakes that get CVs ignored.
6 min read · Updated 2026-11-08 · By the JobLens team
"Add keywords to your CV" is advice everyone has heard and few people act on well. Done badly it produces a CV that reads like a search engine wrote it. Done well, it is invisible — the CV simply uses the same language as the people hiring, and gets found because of it.
Start with the job description itself — the requirements list and person specification are the recruiter's own search terms. Then look at three or four other adverts for the same title; the words that recur across all of them are the ones recruiters search for generally. Finally, look at LinkedIn profiles of people already doing the job at that employer. Their skills sections show you the vocabulary of the team.
A faster route: paste the advert into JobLens and it extracts the keywords, tells you which are already in your CV and which are missing, and shows where each one appears in the job description so you understand why it matters.
Parsers and recruiters both weight some places more heavily than others. In order of impact: your job titles, your profile, a dedicated skills section, and your achievement bullets. A keyword that appears once in a skills list and once in context in a bullet is far stronger than the same word repeated five times in one place.
JobLens compares your CV to any advert and lists exactly which terms are found, which are missing, and where to add them.
Enough to cover every essential requirement in the advert, demonstrated in context. For most roles that is 10–20 distinct terms across the profile, skills and experience sections.
Some newer systems do to a limited degree, but you should not rely on it. Use the exact wording from the advert wherever it is truthful.
Yes — the cover letter is often parsed as well, and it is a natural place to show the most important two or three skills in a short story.
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