There's a debate about whether cover letters even get read anymore. The honest answer: sometimes by a person, sometimes by software, and occasionally by both. If a company runs an applicant tracking system that indexes the cover letter, the words you choose affect whether your application surfaces. So it's worth understanding how keywords work here, without turning your letter into a keyword dump that a human would hate.

Do ATS systems actually read cover letters?

Not all of them, and not always. Many ATS platforms parse and search the resume far more aggressively than the cover letter. But some index both, and recruiters do run keyword searches across all attached documents. A 2023 recruiter survey found a meaningful share still filter or sort by terms found anywhere in the application.

The practical takeaway is simple. Don't bet your application on the cover letter being machine-read, but don't waste the space either. Write it for a person first, then make sure the obvious role keywords are present in natural sentences.

Where to find the keywords

The job posting is the source. It already contains the exact phrasing the company uses, which is usually the phrasing loaded into the ATS search. Pull keywords from three places:

• The job title itself. If they wrote "Customer Success Manager," use that phrase, not "client relationship lead."
• The required skills and tools. Named software, methodologies, certifications, languages.
• Repeated terms. If "stakeholder management" appears three times in the posting, it matters to them.

Make a short list of five or six of these. That's your target, not twenty. A focused set you can weave in naturally beats a long list you have to cram.

How to use them without sounding like a robot

The failure mode is obvious when you see it: a paragraph that lists every skill from the posting in a comma-separated run. A human reads that and stops. The keyword is supposed to appear as part of a real sentence about something you did.

Compare:

• Skilled in stakeholder management, agile, roadmapping, and cross-functional leadership.
• When two teams disagreed on the roadmap, I ran the stakeholder sessions that got us to a shared plan in two weeks.

The second one contains the keyword "stakeholder" and "roadmap" while also proving you can do the thing. That's the standard: every keyword earns its place inside a claim, not a list.

Use the exact term from the posting when it's a hard requirement, because the ATS matches strings, not synonyms. If they want "SQL" and you wrote "database querying," a keyword search may miss you. For softer skills, natural phrasing is fine.

Don't sacrifice the letter to the algorithm

Here's the part people get wrong. They optimize so hard for the machine that the letter stops working on the human who reads it next. The ATS, if it filters at all, just decides whether your application moves forward. A person decides whether to interview you. Write something a person wants to read, then check that the must-have terms are in there.

If you want a shortcut, the same keywords you target in the cover letter should already be in your CV, since that's the document the ATS reads hardest. Building both from one consistent source helps, which is part of why some people generate their CV from their LinkedIn profile with a tool like Postulit and then mirror the strongest keywords into the letter.

Take the posting, highlight the five terms that repeat or sit in the requirements, and make sure each one shows up in a sentence that describes real work. That's the whole method.