Tool

Job post keyword overlap helper

This is for people tailoring a resume to a specific posting who want a quick view of the language gap. Paste the job text on one side and your resume text on the other. The helper lists words from the posting that your resume does not use, words both share, and words only your resume uses. It takes a minute and everything stays in your browser.

This is not a score

Applicant tracking systems differ. Some employers search the text for terms, some only store it for a person to read, and the details are rarely public. This helper counts word matches and nothing else, so it cannot tell you how any system will rank you. Use it to spot terms worth considering, then decide using the rule below.

The rule for using the results

Add a term only if it truthfully describes work you have done, and put it where the evidence is, usually inside a bullet that shows what you did. Skip anything you cannot back up in an interview. A long "missing" list is normal, because postings include company boilerplate, benefits language and generic words. The list is sorted by how often the word appears in the posting, which is only a hint about what matters. Repetition in a posting is a clue worth reading, not a guarantee.

How the matching works

  1. Both texts are lowercased and split into words. Terms such as "c++", "c#" and "node.js" are kept whole.
  2. Common filler words (for example "the", "and", "experience", "team") are ignored.
  3. Simple endings are trimmed so that "manage", "managed" and "managing", or "budget" and "budgets", count as the same word. This is crude: "manager" and "management" are treated as different words, and synonyms such as "lead" and "supervise" are not linked.
  4. Single words only. It does not read phrases, so "project management" appears as two separate words.

Reading the job post by hand

The tool works best after you have read the posting yourself. Look for skills or tools that appear more than once, the problems the role exists to solve, which requirements are labeled required rather than preferred, and what the level of the role sounds like. Then compare with your resume. For the full approach, see tailoring a resume for ATS without keyword stuffing and fixing a resume that looks too general, and use the targeting planner to decide which sections to change.

Privacy

The comparison runs in your browser on this page. The text you paste is not uploaded or stored. If you share a computer, clear the boxes before you leave.

Where this comes from

The advice to take wording from the job description, use common section headings and keep formatting simple comes from guidance on applicant tracking systems published by several university career centers. The same guidance stresses that systems vary, so the tool deliberately gives no score. The word-matching method is this site's own simple design and has not been validated against any real system.