What job descriptions actually ask for: keywords by role, from 7,378 public job postings

Headline findings

• 65.6% of postings (4,841 of 7,378) state a minimum number of years of experience. Among those, the median minimum is 5 years.
• 61.9% of postings (4,566) include a salary or pay range in the description text.
• SQL is not only an engineering keyword: it appears in 27.6% of Finance / accounting postings, the highest share among non-engineering families.
• "Communication" appears in 70.6% of all postings and "stakeholder" in 46.9%. Soft-skill words are common, but they show up as phrases in duties, not as a skills list.
• 29.2% of postings mention a bachelor's degree, and 17.2% accept "equivalent experience" in some form.
• "AI" or a related term appears somewhere in 77.2% of all postings, and in at least 55.3% of postings in every family (the lowest is Operations). Many of these mentions sit in company descriptions or in notices about AI in the hiring process, so this measures how often AI comes up, not how often it is a required skill.
• Pay ranges are most often stated in Product / UX designer postings (82.4%) and least often in Customer support postings (36.1%).
• Sales (AE, SDR, BDR): the most common term from our list is Prospecting, in 66.6% of 1,184 postings.
• Software engineer (general): the most common term from our list is Mentoring, in 52.2% of 536 postings.
• Operations: the most common term from our list is Strategy, in 57.7% of 492 postings.
• Product manager: the most common term from our list is Roadmap, in 80.5% of 282 postings.
• Solutions / sales engineer: the most common term from our list is Demos, in 67.8% of 270 postings.
• Customer success / account management: the most common term from our list is Adoption, in 64.4% of 233 postings.

Terms measured across every posting

The same terms, counted in all 7,378 postings, whatever the role.

Stated minimum years of experience

Of the 4,841 postings that give a number. When a posting gives several, we used the smallest.

• 0-2 years

  18.7%

  906 postings

• 3-4 years

  21.9%

  1,059 postings

• 5-7 years

  36.3%

  1,759 postings

• 8+ years

  23.1%

  1,117 postings

Top keywords by role family

Each table lists the 15 most frequent terms from that family's keyword list. Families are ordered by number of postings.

Left out for having fewer than 30 postings: Data / BI analyst (24), Frontend engineer (23), QA / test engineer (22).

How to use this on your résumé

• Treat these tables as a starting list, not a target. The posting you are applying to is the only keyword list that matters for that application.
• Use the exact wording the posting uses when it is true for you. If it says "Power BI", write "Power BI", not "BI tools".
• Put tools and skills inside bullets that show what you did with them, not only in a skills list. A keyword with a result next to it reads better to a recruiter.
• Leave out anything you can't back up in an interview, however common it is.

To compare your résumé against a specific posting, paste both into the résumé keyword checker. For the full process, see how to tailor a résumé to a job description.

Method and limits

Sources

The public job board APIs that Greenhouse Job Board API (78 boards) and Lever Postings API (13 boards) publish for anyone to read. We tried 142 company boards; 51 returned an error or no postings and were dropped, leaving 91. Requests were made one at a time with a delay between them.

Date

All postings were fetched on 14 November 2026, so this is the set of jobs open on that day. Their listed publish dates run from 5 December 2009 to 14 November 2026 (median 25 September 2026), because some roles stay open for a long time.

Sample

7,418 postings after removing duplicates (the same title and text posted for several locations counts once) and capping each company at 150. We then dropped 40 postings that were not in English, leaving 7,378. Of those, 5,127 matched a role family and 2,251 did not (for example hardware, legal support or facilities roles).

How roles were grouped

By job title only, using ordered pattern rules: more specific titles are matched first, so "Data Engineer" lands in data engineering, not in general software engineering. Seniority is ignored. Some titles will be misfiled; we did not hand-check every one.

What "appears in X% of postings" means

The share of postings in the group whose description mentions the term at least once. A posting that says "SQL" ten times counts once. It does not tell you whether the term was a requirement, a nice-to-have, or part of the company description. Terms are matched with fixed patterns, so variants we did not list are missed, and short words can occasionally match the wrong thing.

Biases to keep in mind

Companies that use Greenhouse or Lever skew toward tech and venture-backed firms, so engineering, data and go-to-market roles are over-represented and fields like healthcare, retail or trades are mostly absent. By a rough check of the location field, 56.1% of postings list a US location, so wording and pay-range rules reflect the US more than anywhere else. Job descriptions also include boilerplate (benefits, equal-opportunity text) that can raise counts for words like "diversity" or "remote". This is one snapshot from one day, not a trend over time.

What we stored

Only the aggregate counts on this page. We did not keep or publish job description text, and no personal data was collected.