A match score measures one specific thing: how much of what a job posting asks for shows up, recognisably, in your resume. It does not measure whether you are good at your job. And because it measures something specific, it moves with specific changes, not with general rewrites.
This guide is ordered by real impact, from what moves the needle most to what moves it least. If you only have fifteen minutes, do the first three and skip the rest. If what you want is what the number itself means and how it is calculated, we cover that separately in how resume checkers work; here we go straight to what to do to raise it.
0. First: confirm your file actually parses
This is not an optimisation step, it is the precondition. If your resume is laid out in two columns, with tables, or with contact details in the header, the text can come out scrambled during extraction, and then whatever score you see means nothing: it is not measuring your resume, it is measuring a jumbled text.
Check it in two minutes: open the PDF, select all the text, copy it, paste it into Notepad. If it comes out in order, keep reading. If it comes out scrambled, fix that first, because any improvement you layer on top is lost. The detail is in whether an ATS reads columns and tables.
1. The job title. It carries the most weight and almost nobody touches it
If the posting is looking for a "Data Analyst" and your resume says "Business Intelligence Specialist", you are asking someone to do the translation. Sometimes they do. In an automated comparison, frequently they do not.
What to do, without lying: use your real title and, where it differs from the posting's, add the equivalent in parentheses or on the role's description line.
Business Intelligence Specialist (Data Analyst)
Acme Inc. · 03/2022 - Present
This is not inventing a job. It is stating the recognisable equivalent of the one you already hold. If your internal title is "Consultant II" or "Level 3 Executive", the translation is outright mandatory: those titles mean nothing outside your company.
2. The hard skills the posting names literally
Concrete, verifiable skills (tools, languages, regulations, methodologies, certifications) are the ones compared term by term. And here the detail that decides it is the exact wording.
- If the posting says "advanced Excel", do not write only "spreadsheet proficiency".
- If it says "SQL", do not write only "databases".
- If it says "Power BI", do not leave it implied inside "visualisation tools".
The rule is simple: the posting sets the vocabulary. When you genuinely can do something that goes by two names, write both once. "Inventory management (stock control)" covers both searches without repeating anything.
How to pull that list of terms out of a specific posting, step by step, is in how to tailor your resume to a job description.
3. The explicit requirements that can be verified
Many postings include requirements that are checked at a glance: years of experience, a certification, a language with a level, willingness to travel, a degree. If you meet them and they are not written down, you are losing them.
Go through the posting and mark every checkable requirement. Then look for each one in your resume. Add the missing ones where they belong: years are inferred from your dates, so make sure the dates are complete and legible; certifications go with their official name and year; languages go with a level.
4. Where you put the words, not just whether you put them
A skill listed loose in a "Skills" section counts for less than the same skill demonstrated inside a job, with context and a result. A list of thirty words at the end of the document is easy to write and easy to discount.
Compare:
Skills: SQL, Power BI, advanced Excel
With:
Automated the weekly sales report in SQL and Power BI,
cutting each week's close from 6 hours to 20 minutes.
The second version contains the same terms and additionally proves you used them. If you have to choose where to put your three most important skills, put them in the description of your most recent job.
5. Section headings with standard names
"Work Experience", "Education", "Skills". Not "My Journey", "My Path", or "What I Can Do". Standard names let your content be sorted into the right fields; creative ones force guessing, and when the guess is wrong your experience gets filed in the wrong place. It is a two-minute change with no cost at all.
What does not move the score, even though it looks like it should
Design. Colours, typography, icons, and skill level bars add nothing to the comparison against the posting. They can subtract, if they break the text order, but they never add.
Repeating the same word many times. Putting "Excel" in fourteen times multiplies nothing and leaves a resume no person wants to read. One mention in the right place, inside an achievement, is worth more than fourteen loose ones.
Nice action verbs. "Led", "drove", "spearheaded" improve how your resume reads for a person, and that matters, but they are not what gets compared against the role's requirements.
Pasting the requirements at the bottom in white text. This resurfaces periodically as a trick. It is hidden text, it shows up in the same copy-paste test you run yourself, and when it is found the result is not a low score, it is being removed from the process.
When a low score is the correct answer
Worth saying because almost nobody does: sometimes the number is low because you do not fit that role, and no honest rewrite will change it. If the posting wants five years of a tool you touched for two months, the score is working properly.
A low score has two very different readings and they are worth separating. If the posting asks for things you genuinely can do, it is a problem with how your resume is written and this guide fixes it. If it asks for things you cannot do, the score is saving you an application, and the useful information is what the gap is, so you can close it or look elsewhere.
A working order that holds up
- Copy-paste test. If it fails, fix it and start over.
- Align your title with the posting's.
- Copy the exact vocabulary of the five hard skills the posting repeats most.
- Check the verifiable requirements one by one.
- Move your three most important terms out of the skills list and into the body of a job.
- Measure again.
The important part of step 6: change one thing at a time and measure. That way you know what moved the number, and the lesson carries to the next posting.