Reading a job post for the words that count

Two sections matter, one does not

Not every phrase in a job posting is worth pulling into your resume. The requirements section repeats the words that actually get checked against a candidate. The responsibilities section describes a day in the role and drifts into language nobody is screening for. The company blurb at the top is marketing copy written by someone in brand, not by the hiring manager, and it belongs nowhere in your resume. If you read only one part of a posting closely, read the requirements list.

What a real requirements section looks like

Take a realistic excerpt: "5+ years in a data analyst or BI role. Advanced SQL required. Experience with Looker or a comparable BI tool. History of building self-serve dashboards for non-technical stakeholders. Comfort presenting findings to leadership." Five sentences, four of them naming something specific: SQL, Looker, self-serve dashboards, presenting to leadership. Those four are what a screener, human or automated, is pattern matching your resume against. The line about "5+ years" is a threshold to clear, not a phrase to insert anywhere.

Now the responsibilities section from the same posting: "You will partner cross-functionally to drive data-informed decision making in a fast-paced environment." Nothing there is a keyword. "Partner cross-functionally" and "fast-paced environment" are two of the most common phrases in job postings generally, which makes them two of the least useful phrases to borrow, because they describe the posting's tone, not a skill anyone is checking for.

Nice to have is a wish list, not a requirement

Most postings carry a third section, often labeled "nice to have" or "bonus points," listing five or six additional skills. Treat this section as low priority information, not a second requirements list. It tells you what would make a candidate exceptional in the hiring manager's imagination on the day the posting was drafted, which is a different thing from what gets a resume past a first read. If you genuinely have one of the nice-to-have items, a single mention is worth including. Reorganizing your whole resume around a wish list item is a common mistake, and it usually pushes an actual requirement further down the page to make room for something that was never going to be checked closely.

A posting that lists "experience with dbt" under nice to have, when SQL and Looker are the two items above it in the requirements section, is telling you dbt is a plus if you already have it and a non-issue if you do not. Spending your rewrite on inserting a half-true dbt reference for that one posting is not worth the risk of a follow-up question in an interview that you cannot answer well.

Folding a keyword in without faking it

Say you have used Looker for two years but your resume currently says "built dashboards in an internal BI tool." That is worth fixing, because "Looker" is a keyword you can honestly claim and "internal BI tool" is not. The rewrite is a small swap, not a new bullet: "built dashboards in Looker for the revenue team, replacing a manual weekly export." You added the tool's name and a result. Nothing about the underlying work changed.

Compare that to a posting asking for "Tableau" when your real experience is in Looker. Do not rename Looker to Tableau. Naming the wrong tool is the one keyword mistake that gets caught immediately, either by a screener who knows the difference or in the first ten minutes of an interview, and it costs more credibility than the missing keyword would have cost you on its own. If you genuinely have experience in both, list both. If you have one, name the one you have.

Requirements repeat, responsibilities drift

Read two or three postings for similar roles at similar companies and the requirements sections start to converge: the same four or five tools and skills reappear in a slightly different order each time. The responsibilities sections diverge much more, because they are usually written by whoever drafted that specific posting and reflect one manager's shorthand for the job rather than a checklist anyone else is using. That is why requirements are the reliable source for tailoring and responsibilities mostly are not. When a phrase from the responsibilities section does repeat across several postings for the same kind of role, that repetition is a real signal. A single posting's responsibilities line, on its own, is not.

What convergence looks like across three postings

Pull the requirements sections from three real postings for the same kind of role, say, three "Senior Product Manager, Platform" listings at three different companies. One asks for "experience with API design and internal developer tooling." Another asks for "background partnering with engineering on platform architecture decisions." A third asks for "comfort scoping technical tradeoffs directly with engineers." None of these three sentences match word for word, but all three are circling the same underlying thing: this role wants a PM who can operate close to engineering, not one whose experience is entirely customer facing. That is the signal worth building a bullet around, even though no single posting handed you the exact phrase "close to engineering." The individual words differ every time; the underlying requirement repeats.

This is also useful for someone applying broadly to one kind of role rather than tailoring for a single posting: reading five or six postings for the same title before you touch your resume tells you which two or three requirements are load bearing across the whole category, versus which ones are one company's idiosyncratic phrasing that is not worth rebuilding a bullet around.

Where this fits in the fifteen-minute version

Pulling keywords is the first step of tailoring, not the whole job. Once you have two or three real phrases from the requirements section, the next moves are reordering your bullets so the matching ones lead and cutting the ones that do not apply, both covered in tailoring a resume without rewriting it. The same requirements section usually resurfaces almost word for word in the interview itself, since it is often the document the interviewer was handed to screen against; see preparing for an interview using the job post for how to use it a second time. And once you know which keyword belongs where, the bullet carrying it still has to earn its place on the page; see resume bullets that survive a ten-second read.

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