The goal with online applications is not to make yourself look good to a person reading the application, but to make yourself look good to the screener program.

Meaning, you need to use their language to get your application through the screener and flagged for personal review.

So, take anything that they put in their “requirements” or “qualifications” or whatever and put that in your application. Copy and paste. If they use “experienced program manager with demonstrated success in leading cross-functional teams” then you need to copy that and paste it into the skills section on your application.

It doesn’t matter if you had essentially the same thing just different wording, on your existing resume, it needs to pop in their screener as a match.

There isn’t a person reading these at this stage, it’s a program, and it’s looking for key words and phrases that they have set up to weed through applicants.

As someone who has been on the hiring side, and used third parties like Indeed, we only receive applications that are a high percentage match for what we’ve put in as our parameters.

If your application has zero hits on the key words and phrases, while you may be an excellent candidate and person, we’ll never know.

And those parameters can be as wide or as narrow as a company wants, and since you never know, better to look at what you can move around to exact match their listing.

I’ve also heard of people doing things like putting key words and phrases into the margins of a resume in white font so they can’t be seen with the eye but will get read by a screener and other “hacks” like that.