The keyword matching game: how to play it right

A recruiter at a mid-sized SaaS company in Munich told me she has roughly 400 candidates sitting in Greenhouse for a single Senior Backend Engineer role. She doesn't read 400 CVs. She searches.

Her search that week: "Kotlin" AND "Kafka" AND "AWS".

If your CV says "JVM languages, event streaming, cloud infrastructure" — all technically correct — you don't come up. You're in the database, but you're invisible to her.

This is the real keyword game. Not tricking an algorithm. Being findable by a person who is typing actual words into a search box.

The search, not the score

Most modern ATSes (Greenhouse, Lever, Workday, SmartRecruiters) don't score candidates against a job description. What they do have is a search bar. Recruiters use it constantly.

When a recruiter has 400 applicants and three open roles, she's not reading chronologically. She's searching for the specific skills that matter for the role in front of her. If the words she's searching for aren't in your CV, you may as well not exist.

This reframes the whole keyword conversation. The question isn't "how do I pass the ATS?" It's "what words will a recruiter type when they're looking for someone like me?"

How to figure out what words to use

The job description is your primary source. Read it carefully, but read it for what's actually being searched for — not every adjective.

Specifically, look for:

• Tools and technologies named explicitly. Kotlin, Salesforce, SAP S/4HANA, Figma, Tableau. These are search-friendly because they're unambiguous.
• Role-specific methodologies. "SCRUM", "OKRs", "ABM", "GDPR compliance".
• Industry terms that the job description leans on repeatedly.
• The exact job title as it appears in the posting.

Ignore:

• Soft skills filler. "Passionate self-starter" is not a search term.
• Generic phrases. "Cross-functional collaboration" won't be searched.
• Buzzwords that don't appear in the job description itself.

A concrete example

Take a real job description for a Berlin fintech, Product Marketing Manager role. Pull out the specific terms: "B2B SaaS," "go-to-market," "product launches," "positioning," "competitive intelligence," "Pendo," "customer interviews," "pricing strategy."

Now look at a typical CV for someone who's done this job. Often it reads: "Led cross-functional initiatives to drive product adoption and enhance market positioning across key verticals."

That sentence is technically relevant and says nothing a recruiter would search for. Rewrite it:

"Led 4 B2B SaaS product launches in 2024, including go-to-market strategy, positioning, and pricing. Ran monthly customer interviews and competitive intelligence reports via Pendo."

Same work. Different words. Now she's searchable.

The "use the exact word" rule

Here's a rule that sounds trivial but costs people interviews: use the exact word from the job description, not a synonym.

If the job description says "Kubernetes," don't write "container orchestration." If it says "OKRs," don't write "goal-setting frameworks." If it says "Google Ads," don't write "paid search."

You can include both — context plus the exact term — but the exact term needs to be there. Recruiter search bars don't understand synonyms. If they type "Kubernetes," a CV with "container orchestration" is invisible.

What not to do

A few tactics that sound clever and backfire:

1. White text keyword stuffing at the bottom of the CV. Most modern ATSes strip formatting on parse, so the recruiter sees a wall of nonsense keywords. Instant trash.
2. Irrelevant keywords for buzz. Adding "machine learning" to a CV where you've never done ML gets you to the interview and then exposed in 30 seconds. Don't.
3. Listing every keyword you've ever touched. A CV full of every tool you once clicked on is harder to search, not easier. Focus on what you actually did.

Match the role in front of you

This also means one CV per job, or at least meaningful edits per application. A single master CV that tries to cover everything will be worse at every specific search than a targeted version.

This is why "tailor your CV" is actual advice and not a cliche. You're not tailoring vibes. You're making sure the words the recruiter types will find you.

If you want to see how well your CV matches a specific role before hitting submit, WunderJob's Match Score shows the gap between the words in the job description and the words in your CV — the same gap a recruiter's search bar is about to find.

The takeaway

Play the game at the search-bar level, not the algorithm level. Read the job description, pull out the specific named things, use the exact words, and make sure the truth of your experience is visible in the terms someone would actually type.