A resume keyword scanner compares your resume against a job description and shows you the gap: which terms the employer emphasizes that your resume never says. That gap matters because recruiters find candidates by searching the ATS database for those exact terms — a missing keyword is a search you don't appear in.
The scanner below is free and requires no account: paste your resume and the job description, and you'll get your match score plus the specific missing keywords, ranked by importance.
Recruiter searches are mostly literal string matching, sometimes with light synonym support. That has practical consequences: "project management" and "managed projects" may both work for a human but only one may match a search; "CPA" and "Certified Public Accountant" are different strings; the software rarely infers that five years of Photoshop implies "Adobe Creative Suite". When in doubt, use the job description's exact wording — and for critical acronyms, write both forms once.
Keywords also carry different weight. A term in the job title or repeated three times in the requirements is load-bearing; something mentioned once under "nice to have" is not. A good scan tells you not just what's missing but what's worth adding first.
Read the posting and highlight four things: the job title itself, hard skills and tools that appear more than once, required certifications or credentials, and the recurring domain vocabulary (the words the company uses to describe the work — "campaigns", "claims", "deployments"). That highlighted list, minus anything untrue of you, is your target keyword set.
Then place them where they carry weight: the most important terms belong in your summary and inside achievement bullets, not just in a skills list. "Led paid social campaigns across Meta and TikTok, cutting CAC 22%" matches three searches and reads like a human wrote it.
Don't paste keyword lists in white text, repeat terms unnaturally, or claim skills you don't have. White-text tricks are visible to parsers (which strip formatting) and to recruiters (who often view the extracted plain text — your hidden block shows up highlighted). And every keyword that gets you an interview becomes an interview question. The scanner's purpose is coverage of what's true, phrased the way employers search for it — not decoration.
Paste your resume — and the job description if you have one — and get an instant ATS score with the exact keywords you're missing and what to fix first.
Check your resume free — no sign-up, instant score →There's no magic number, but covering the job title, the top 5–8 hard skills, and any required certifications typically puts you ahead of most applicants. Chasing 100% match usually means stuffing — prioritize the terms the posting repeats or marks as required.
Occasionally — 'stakeholder management' or 'cross-functional collaboration' do get searched. But hard skills, tools, titles, and certifications dominate real recruiter queries. Show soft skills through what you did ('presented findings to the executive team') rather than adjective lists.
No. Your resume text is used to generate the scan and isn't saved to an account or used to train models. No sign-up is required to run a scan.
The posting's words, where they're true of you. Matching is largely literal, so 'customer success' vs 'account management' or 'iOS development' vs 'mobile development' can be the difference between appearing in a search or not. Save your own phrasing for the details behind each bullet.