ATS Resume Keywords: A Real Job Ad Method That Actually Works

You can have a gorgeous resume and still get murdered by a piece of software you never see.

I’ve watched senior managers, brilliant engineers, and marketers with real results get ghosted, not because they were weak, but because an applicant tracking system decided they were invisible. That’s the ugly truth. If your ats resume isn’t speaking the machine’s language, you’re not even in the room.

Let’s fix that.

This is my step-by-step method to rip keywords out of real job ads, squeeze them into a resume for ats without turning it into spam soup, and watch the ATS score climb.

Stop Guessing, Start Stealing (From Job Ads)

Most people write a resume like a diary of what they’ve done. The applicant tracking system doesn’t care. It’s not reading your story. It’s matching patterns.

So I don’t start with the resume. I start with the target.

Here’s the workflow I force on every client:

1. Pick 3 to 5 job ads for basically the same role.
2. Extract the requirements and responsibilities.
3. Find the recurring resume keywords.
4. Map those keywords directly into your summary, skills, and experience.

You’re not being “fake.” You’re translating your career into the vocabulary the employer already uses.

Let’s walk it, step by step.

Step 1: Pick Your “North Star” Job Ads

If your job search is “anything in marketing” or “open to opportunities,” your ats optimization will be trash. The applicant tracking system wants specificity. So pick a lane.

Say you want a Product Manager role in SaaS. You go to your favorite job board and:

• Filter by: Product Manager, location (or remote), industry (SaaS / software)
• Pick 3 to 5 roles that:
  • You’d actually want
  • You’re at least 60–70% qualified for

Save those job ads. PDF, copy into a document, whatever. But keep them. They are now your blueprint.

I call one of them the “North Star” posting. That’s the ideal role you want your resume pointed at. The others are your calibration.

If you’re aiming for a Customer Success Manager role, same thing. Maybe:

• Customer Success Manager – B2B SaaS
• Senior Customer Success Manager – Enterprise
• Client Success Manager – Tech

If they’re all vaguely similar, your keyword signals will be strong. If you mix “Customer Success” with “Sales Ops” and “Product Owner,” your signal turns into static.

Step 2: Copy the Requirements Into a Word Cloud or Sheet

Now we harvest.

Take each job ad and copy these sections into a single document or spreadsheet:

• Responsibilities
• Requirements / Qualifications
• Preferred skills

Skip the fluffy company pitch. You want the part that starts sounding like:

• “You will…”
• “Responsibilities include…”
• “Requirements:”

Option A, the lazy but effective route, is a word cloud tool. Paste all the text in. Crank out a cloud of repeated words and phrases.

Option B, my preferred method, is a spreadsheet. More work, more control.

Here’s how I structure it:

• Column A: Exact phrase from the job ad
• Column B: Normalized skill or concept
• Column C: Frequency (how many job ads mention it)

Example for a Product Manager target:

• A: “Define product roadmap and strategy” → B: Product roadmap, product strategy
• A: “Work with cross-functional teams” → B: Cross-functional collaboration
• A: “Manage product backlog and prioritize features” → B: Backlog management, feature prioritization
• A: “Work with engineering to deliver features” → B: Stakeholder collaboration, delivery
• A: “Experience with Jira, Confluence” → B: Jira, Confluence

Every time you see a similar phrase in another job ad, bump the frequency count.

Within 20–30 lines, you’ll start seeing a pattern. That pattern is the language the applicant tracking system is hunting for.

Step 3: Cluster Skills Into Themes

Now you’ve got a bunch of scattered keywords. Time to turn chaos into structure.

I group resume keywords into 3 buckets:

1. Core functional skills
2. Tools and technologies
3. Domain / context keywords

Why? Because different parts of your ats resume are better suited to different types of keywords.

Let’s pretend this is what your spreadsheet is screaming at you for a Product Manager role:

• Product roadmap
• Product strategy
• User research
• A/B testing
• Stakeholder management
• Agile
• Scrum
• Backlog management
• Jira
• SQL
• SaaS
• B2B
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Data-driven decisions
• KPIs, OKRs

I’d cluster like this:

Core functional skills

• Product roadmap, product strategy
• User research, A/B testing
• Stakeholder management
• Backlog management
• Data-driven decisions
• Cross-functional collaboration

Tools / tech

• Jira
• SQL
• Maybe Figma, Amplitude, GA, etc., if they appeared

Domain / context

• SaaS
• B2B
• Agile, Scrum
• KPIs, OKRs

Now the magic trick. Each cluster gets its favorite spot in your resume:

• Summary: Core functional + domain
• Skills section: Tools + distilled functional skills
• Experience bullets: Mix of all three, but written like real achievements

Step 4: Rewrite Your Summary Like a Targeted Ad

Your summary is not a memoir. It’s a targeted ad for one type of role.

What most people write:

“Experienced professional with strong communication, leadership, and problem-solving skills. Seeking an opportunity to grow and contribute to a dynamic organization.”

That doesn’t survive even one second with an applicant tracking system. It has zero meaningful resume keywords.

For our Product Manager example, after keyword clustering, I’d write something like:

“Product Manager with 5+ years leading B2B SaaS products from discovery to launch, experienced in product roadmap ownership, backlog prioritization, and cross-functional collaboration with engineering, design, and go-to-market teams. Known for data-driven decisions using experimentation, user research, and product analytics, with hands-on experience in Agile environments, Jira, and KPI / OKR tracking.”

Is it dense? Yes. On purpose.

Notice what I’m doing:

• Direct job title match: “Product Manager”
• Domain: “B2B SaaS”
• Functional skills: “product roadmap,” “backlog prioritization,” “cross-functional collaboration,” “user research,” “experimentation”
• Context: “Agile,” “KPI / OKR tracking”
• Tools: “Jira,” “product analytics”

This is ATS optimization without turning your summary into a stupid keyword list. It still reads like a human.

Step 5: Turn the Skills Section Into a Keyword Magnet

If your skills section says “Leadership, Teamwork, Communication,” I already know your ATS score is suffering.

You want your skills section to mirror the language in your job postings, not whatever generic nonsense came with your old template.

For our Product Manager, I’d split skills like this:

Core Skills

• Product roadmap & strategy
• Backlog management & prioritization
• A/B testing & experimentation
• User research & discovery
• Stakeholder management
• Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

• Jira, Confluence
• SQL (basic / intermediate)
• Figma (for prototyping)
• Amplitude, Google Analytics

Methodologies

• Agile, Scrum
• OKR / KPI tracking

If three job ads mention “roadmap” and “strategy,” I keep both. If half say “A/B testing” and half say “experimentation,” I use both in one phrase. I’m deliberately echoing the applicant tracking system’s phrase bank.

This is precision, not stuffing.

Step 6: Rewrite Experience Bullets Around Target Keywords

Here’s where people either win or die.

The worst instinct is to paste a block of skills into your experience like a Christmas tree of buzzwords. That’s what gets you flagged as keyword stuffing.

So I do this instead. For each experience bullet, I:

1. Start with an action + outcome.
2. Inject 1 to 2 priority keywords that fit naturally.

Weak bullet:

“Responsible for managing product lifecycle and working with stakeholders.”

Stronger, keyword-aligned bullet:

“Owned end-to-end product roadmap for a B2B SaaS product used by 500+ customers, partnering with engineering and design to prioritize backlog and deliver features that increased activation rate by 14%.”

See it?

• “Product roadmap”
• “B2B SaaS”
• “Prioritize backlog”
• Stakeholder collaboration implied via “engineering and design”

Another one:

Weak:

“Collaborated with team to improve product metrics.”

Better:

“Ran A/B tests and user research sessions to validate new features, using product analytics and SQL to inform data-driven decisions that improved trial-to-paid conversion by 9%.”

Now you have:

• “A/B tests”
• “user research”
• “product analytics”
• “SQL”
• “data-driven decisions”

That’s how you feed the applicant tracking system without sounding like a robot.

How to Avoid Keyword Stuffing While Still Being Aggressive

Let me be blunt. If your resume sounds ridiculous when read out loud, the recruiter will hate it, even if the ATS loves it.

So I use three guardrails:

1. No pure keyword lists in experience bullets.
2. Each priority keyword must be attached to a result, responsibility, or tool.
3. If a word appears more than 6–8 times on a two-page resume, I look for synonyms or trim it.

Bad stuffing example:

“Product management, product roadmap, backlog, Agile, Scrum, product strategy, product manager, Jira, KPIs, OKRs, cross-functional teams.”

That’s a red flag. It looks like someone tried to hack the system instead of telling a story.

Cleaned up:

“Led Agile product management for a cross-functional squad, using Jira to manage backlog and sprint planning, and tracking KPIs / OKRs to guide roadmap and feature strategy.”

Same keywords, but wrapped in an actual sentence with context and impact.

That passes the human sniff test and still feeds the machine.

A Quick Case Study: Before and After ATS Scores

Let me walk you through a very real pattern I’ve seen with a client I’ll call Maya.

Maya was a Customer Success Manager trying to move into a Senior CSM role at a SaaS company. She was applying like crazy, getting almost nothing back.

Her original resume looked “nice.” Modern template, some color, icons, the usual Pinterest resume aesthetic. Terrible for an ats resume, but that’s another rant.

We ran her resume through a typical ATS-style checker against a Senior Customer Success Manager job description. Her initial match score: 34%.

What was missing?

The job ad kept hammering:

• “Customer health scores”
• “Renewals and expansions”
• “QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews)”
• “Churn reduction”
• “Onboarding and adoption”
• “CSM playbooks”
• “Sales collaboration”
• “B2B SaaS”

Her resume talked about:

• “Managing client relationships”
• “Helping customers be successful”
• “Internal and external communication”

Humanly similar. ATS-wise, totally different universe.

Here’s what we did, following this exact workflow.

1. Job ad extraction

We pulled 4 Senior CSM postings, dumped responsibilities and requirements into a sheet, and tallied frequencies. Top phrases:

• Customer health scores
• Renewals / expansions
• Churn reduction
• Onboarding, adoption
• QBRs, business reviews
• Stakeholder alignment
• B2B SaaS

2. Summary rewrite

Before:

“Customer-focused professional with 6+ years of experience managing client relationships and driving satisfaction for a variety of customers. Strong communicator and team player.”

After:

“Senior-level Customer Success Manager with 6+ years owning B2B SaaS customer portfolios, focused on driving onboarding, product adoption, and renewal / expansion outcomes. Experienced in managing customer health scores, leading QBRs with executive stakeholders, and partnering with Sales to reduce churn and grow revenue across mid-market and enterprise accounts.”

Now we’re speaking the same language as the applicant tracking system.

3. Skills section overhaul

We added a clean list:

• Customer health scoring
• Onboarding & adoption
• Renewals & expansions
• Churn reduction
• QBRs / executive business reviews
• Stakeholder management
• CRM: Salesforce, Gainsight
• B2B SaaS

Same person, different vocabulary.

4. Experience bullets reworked

Before:

“Managed 60+ client accounts and ensured satisfaction by providing excellent service and communication.”

After:

“Owned a portfolio of 65 B2B SaaS accounts with $3.2M ARR, using customer health scores and adoption metrics to prioritize outreach, resulting in a 7-point increase in average health score over 12 months.”

Another one:

Before:

“Worked with sales and other teams to support customer needs and address issues.”

After:

“Partnered with Sales on renewal and expansion strategy, leading QBRs with VP-level stakeholders and contributing to 92% gross renewal rate and 18% expansion revenue across the portfolio.”

We didn’t stuff anything. We just took what she actually did and rewired it into the keywords the job ads used.

5. ATS score change

We ran the revised resume through the same ATS-style checker against the same primary job description.

• Before: 34%
• After: 79%

Did that guarantee interviews? Of course not. But within 3 weeks, she started seeing something she hadn’t seen in months: actual callbacks. Same career. Different ATS strategy.

When to Customize and When to Chill

I get this pushback constantly: “Do I have to rewrite my resume for every single job?”

No. That’s how people burn out.

Here’s my rule.

• Create one strong master resume per role type, built from 3–5 job ads.
• For high-priority roles, make light edits:
  • Tweak the summary to mirror the exact job title.
  • Reorder or swap a few skills to match their language.
  • Adjust 2–3 bullets to echo any unique requirements.

You’re not reinventing the wheel every time. You’re just tuning it.

If a job ad keeps yelling “experimentation,” and your resume only says “A/B testing,” add “experimentation” once or twice. If their ad obsesses over “OKRs,” make sure OKRs actually appear on your resume instead of only “KPIs.”

Tiny adjustments, big signal difference.

The Harsh Truth About Pretty Resumes and ATS

Let me say the quiet part out loud. A lot of the “beautiful” templates floating around are horrible for ATS.

I’ve seen:

• Job titles in text boxes that never get read.
• Skills hidden in icons or sidebars.
• Keywords embedded only in graphics.

The applicant tracking system often reads resumes top to bottom, left to right, like a slightly drunk screen reader. If your most important resume keywords live in decorative corners, you’re asking to be misread.

So keep the structure boring and the content sharp:

• Standard headings: Summary, Skills, Experience, Education
• No cute columns that break reading order
• Keywords in plain text, not inside shapes or images

You want the style to feel human, but the skeleton needs to be machine-friendly. That’s how you build a resume for ATS that survives the first round and still feels like you.

Here’s the thing. The system is rigged in favor of people who speak its language. You can complain about that, or you can learn the language and walk right through the front door.