What the letter supports, and what it only names

A requirement counts as supported only when the sentence naming it also describes doing something. A letter that lists the job's own words back at it scores nothing here.

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What the letter supports, and what it only names

Paste a letter you already have and the posting it is for. A requirement counts as supported only when the sentence naming it also describes doing something — so a letter that lists the job's own words back at it scores nothing.

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What this can and cannot tell you. No applicant-tracking system publishes its ranking logic, and two employers running the same product can have it configured differently. So nothing here predicts, scores or guarantees anything about an employer's system. What it does is test the document itself — what text is recoverable, what structure is detectable, and how it compares with a job description you supply.
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What counts as support

The sentence containing the term must also contain a verb of doing — built, led, ran, delivered, negotiated and the rest. A sentence with more than four commas is treated as a list and does not count however many verbs are in it.

This is a deliberately crude rule and it will occasionally be wrong. It is crude in the direction of under-crediting you, which is the safer direction: a letter that passes this is not relying on keyword presence.

Nothing is rewritten. Where a requirement is missing you are shown that it is missing. Adding it is your decision and should depend on whether it is true.

Naming a technology is not evidence of using it

"I have experience with Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and AWS" contains three of the job's terms and tells the reader nothing. "I led the migration of forty services to Kubernetes and took deploy time from forty-five minutes to eight" contains one of them and answers the question.

The first sentence is faster to write, which is why letters are full of them. It is also the sentence a reader skips.

Coverage is a diagnostic, not a target

A letter supporting three of the eight requirements well is stronger than one naming all eight. Do not write toward the number here — it exists to show you which of your sentences are doing work.

Repetition is worth seeing

The words listed as leaned on are the ones a reader will feel. Usually one or two are load-bearing and the rest are habit.