Carefully choosing the best words to include in your resume can make a real difference to how successful your application is. Keywords matter; make no mistake about that. But using them the wrong way can do more harm than good.
When an airline creates a job posting, its HR team selects the attributes that best describe the ideal candidate. We’ve already covered what some of the biggest airlines value in The Best Qualities to Highlight in Your Cabin Crew Application Resume, qualities like empathy, professionalism, and confidence, alongside key skills such as customer service, teamwork, communication, and being friendly and positive.
How the Matching Actually Works
When you submit your application through an airline’s recruitment site, it’s scanned by an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which decides whether you have the qualities and skills for the role by matching the words in your resume against what the airline’s recruiters have defined as important.
Some resume-writing experts argue you should build a bespoke resume for every job you apply for, carefully matching the keywords in the specific job description rather than sending the same generic version everywhere. Jobscan, a resume scanning tool, will compare your resume directly against a job description and give you a match rate based on the hard skills, education, soft skills and other keywords it identifies.
Worth knowing: Jobscan generally recommends aiming for a match rate somewhere in the 75-80% range. That said, it’s worth being clear about what this actually measures: it’s a tailoring guide, not a pass or fail gate. Real ATS platforms don’t auto-reject you the moment you drop below a set percentage; they parse and rank candidates rather than applying a single hard cutoff. Jobscan itself cautions against chasing every possible keyword.
The Old Trick That No Longer Works
A few years ago, before ATS systems became so widespread and sophisticated, there was a resume “hack” that promised to guarantee a shortlist. The trick worked like this: identify every keyword from the job description, type them all in a tiny font at the bottom of your resume, then change the text colour to white so a recruiter wouldn’t spot them on a printed copy. You could keep the same generic resume for every application and still, in theory, sail through the ATS.
Whatever you do, don’t try this. Modern ATS software will identify this kind of trick and reject your resume immediately.
Insight: A lot of ATS platforms now use contextual search when scanning a resume, rather than simply looking for keywords in isolation. That means the system is checking the circumstances where a keyword appears, not just whether it’s present. In other words, a bare list of buzzwords with no context behind them can score just as poorly as a resume missing the keyword altogether.
Finding the Balance
There’s no fast or easy trick around this. You’ll sometimes need to sacrifice a keyword rather than force it in. Tools like Jobscan are reallyy useful, but chasing a match on every single keyword, at all costs, usually backfires. You’ll generally know when you’re forcing a keyword in, because the sentence simply won’t read naturally.
💡 Top tip: If a keyword doesn’t fit naturally into something you’ve actually achieved, don’t bend the sentence around it. A resume with 90% of the right keywords, written naturally, will consistently outperform one hitting 100% but reading like a list.
This process takes time, but the effort genuinely helps your chances of landing an interview with the airline you actually want to work for.
Your Keyword Checklist
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Read the job description carefully and noted the specific skills and qualities required
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Matched your resume’s language to the job description naturally, not by forcing every keyword in
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Scanned your resume against the job description using a tool like Jobscan, aiming for the 75-80% range rather than a perfect score
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Checked that every keyword you’ve used is backed by a real, specific example, not just stated
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voided any formatting tricks (hidden text, tiny fonts, white-on-white keywords), these are caught, not missed
Write Your Winning Resume Now
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