Most people think of keywords as a technical concern — something you stuff into the skills section at the bottom of your CV to trick a computer. That misunderstanding leads to two problems: keyword stuffing that reads as unnatural to a human recruiter, and a professional summary at the top of the page that is keyword-free and invisible to ATS software. The professional summary is actually the most important place to use keywords correctly, because it is both the first thing a human reads and one of the sections ATS software weights most heavily. Getting it right means your CV surfaces in searches and makes a strong first impression at the same time.
The keywords that matter in a professional summary are not generic buzzwords — they are the specific terms that the employers you want to work for are searching for when they look for candidates. A recruiter hiring a remote customer success manager is not searching for "excellent communicator." They are searching for "customer success," "churn reduction," "NPS," "Salesforce," "SaaS onboarding," or "enterprise account management" — the exact language of their industry. If none of those terms appear in your summary, your CV will not surface when they search their ATS database, and even if a human opens it, they will not immediately see the match they're looking for. The words you use have to reflect the words the employer uses to describe the role.
Finding the right keywords requires less guesswork than people think. Open three to five job descriptions for the kind of role you want. Read them carefully. Write down the terms that appear repeatedly across all of them — the job titles, the tools, the responsibilities, the methodologies. These are your target keywords. Then read your professional summary and check: are these terms present? Do they appear naturally, in context, backed by evidence? "Experienced in customer success with five years managing SaaS accounts" is using keywords in context. "Customer success, SaaS, NPS, Salesforce, CRM, onboarding, retention" is keyword stuffing — it reads as a list, not a sentence, and a human recruiter will notice. The goal is natural language that happens to contain the right terms, not a sentence designed purely for software.
One important distinction for Kenyan professionals specifically: your keywords may need translation, not because your experience is different, but because the terminology used locally sometimes differs from what international employers use. If you managed customer relationships in Kenyan banking, your local title might have been "Relationship Manager" but the international equivalent keyword is "Account Manager" or "Customer Success Manager." If you handled client complaints, the relevant keyword in global SaaS is "customer support" or "technical support," not "client liaison." Research how your role is described in the international market, mirror that language in your summary, and your document starts working for you instead of against you.
Three Things to Do Right Now
1. Open three job descriptions for roles you're genuinely interested in. Highlight every specific term — tools, titles, responsibilities, methodologies — that appears in more than one posting. These are your target keywords.
2. Read your current professional summary and count how many of those target keywords appear. If the answer is zero or one, rewrite the summary to include the two or three most relevant ones naturally within a sentence about your actual experience.
3. Check that your keywords reflect international terminology, not just local titles. Google your current role plus "remote job" and see what language international employers use to describe the same work.
If you want to know whether your CV is using the right language to get found and get read, My CV Coach gives you specific feedback on your summary, your keywords, and how your full document reads to the employers you're targeting.
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