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Most IT resumes are rejected before a human reads them. These are the specific keywords and phrases that ATS systems score highest for the most in-demand IT roles.
Most enterprise hiring runs CVs through an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) before a human reads a single line. Systems like Workday, SuccessFactors, Greenhouse, and Lever score your resume against the job description — candidates below a threshold score are auto-rejected. The threshold is typically 60–70% keyword match. IT professionals routinely under-keyword their CVs because they describe what they did in plain English rather than industry-standard terms.
High-value terms: Azure Active Directory (Entra ID), Conditional Access, Azure Policy, RBAC, ARM templates, Bicep, Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, KQL, Azure Firewall, NSG, VNet Peering, ExpressRoute, Azure Site Recovery, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Sentinel, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams Governance, SharePoint Online, Intune (Microsoft Endpoint Manager), Windows Autopilot, Zero Trust, Hybrid Azure AD Join.
Common mistakes: writing "managed cloud access" instead of "Azure Active Directory Conditional Access", writing "set up VPN" instead of "configured Azure VPN Gateway with BGP routing". Specificity is what scores.
High-value terms: VPC, EC2, S3, IAM, CloudTrail, CloudWatch, CloudFormation, CDK, ECS, EKS, Fargate, Lambda, API Gateway, RDS, Aurora, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Route 53, CloudFront, ALB/NLB, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, GuardDuty, Security Hub, AWS WAF, Organisations, SCPs, Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Well-Architected Framework.
Weak phrase: "managed cloud infrastructure". Strong phrase: "architected multi-region active-passive DR using AWS Site Recovery and Aurora Global Database, achieving RPO <5 minutes."
High-value terms: SIEM, SOAR, Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, KQL, SPL, MITRE ATT&CK, incident response, threat hunting, vulnerability management, CVSS, penetration testing, Nmap, Nessus, Burp Suite, Metasploit, digital forensics, memory forensics, Volatility, Wireshark, EDR, CrowdStrike, Defender for Endpoint, zero trust, IAM, PAM, CyberArk, ISO 27001, NIST CSF, SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA.
High-value terms: OSPF, BGP, EIGRP, MPLS, SD-WAN (Cisco Viptela, VMware VeloCloud), VLANs, STP/RSTP, EtherChannel, LACP, QoS, DSCP, ACLs, NAT/PAT, IPv6, 802.11ax, WPA3, Cisco IOS, Juniper JunOS, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Wireshark, SNMP, NetFlow, SolarWinds, PRTG, Python network automation, Ansible, Nornir.
Don't create a "Skills" section that's just a list of 40 tools — ATS systems penalise this pattern now. Instead, embed keywords in bullet points that describe outcomes: "Implemented Conditional Access policies across 3,000-user tenant, reducing MFA bypass incidents by 94%" scores for "Conditional Access", "MFA", and "tenant management" while also telling a story a recruiter wants to read.
Use the InterviUni ATS Resume Checker to get your current keyword score, see exactly which terms are missing, and get a rewritten bullet point — in under 60 seconds.
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