How to find the keywords a job posting screens for

A job description is two documents stapled together. One is marketing copy about the mission, the culture and the perks. The other is a list of requirements someone will actually screen against. Only the second one matters for getting past the filter, and it is usually shorter than people think.

Where the screening terms live

• The job title itself, and any variants used in the body.
• The Requirements or Qualifications section, especially anything prefixed with "must have" or given a year count.
• Named tools, platforms, languages, frameworks and certifications. These are the most literal matches an ATS makes.
• Repeated terms. If a word appears three times across the posting, it is load-bearing.

What does not matter: the paragraph about the company's journey, the list of perks, and the phrases that appear in every posting ever written. "Fast-paced environment" is not a keyword. Nobody screens for "team player."

Rank them before you act

Not every screening term is equal. Sort what you find into three buckets, because where you spend your edits should follow the weighting a recruiter gave them.

1. 1Required — named explicitly as a must-have, or attached to a years-of-experience figure. Missing these is usually disqualifying.
2. 2Preferred — listed under "nice to have" or "bonus." Worth including when true; these often decide ties.
3. 3Contextual — mentioned once, in passing. Include if natural, ignore otherwise.

A resume missing two required terms is in much more trouble than one missing six contextual ones, even though the second looks worse on a raw count.

Then check your own page honestly

Take your ranked list and search your resume for each term. Not a synonym — the term. This is uncomfortable, because you will find things you genuinely do that never made it onto the page in the employer's words. That gap is the whole game.

For every term you can truthfully claim and cannot find, ask where that work actually happened, then rewrite that bullet so the term appears in the description of real work. Do not create a keyword list at the bottom of the page. A term inside an accomplishment is credible; the same term in a naked list is not.

Doing it without the tedium

This process is mechanical, which is why it is worth automating. Paste a posting and your resume into Mulika and it produces the ranked list and the gaps directly, along with a match score. The free tier covers three of these a month without a card. If you would rather do it by hand, the method above is the same one, and it works.