Cover letter keywords by field
These lists are a count of the words employers actually wrote. We read 219 real job descriptions that applicants pasted into GenerateCoverLetter.com between December 2025 and June 2026, averaging about 2,800 characters each, and counted how many postings in each field contain each term. Nothing here is generated, estimated, or scraped from another list.
The sample size sits next to every field, including the two that are thin. You should be able to weigh these numbers yourself rather than take our word for them.
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What this measures, and what it does not
People usually call these ATS keywords. We want to be exact about the claim, because the distinction matters when you are deciding what to put in a letter. What we can show you is which terms appear in real postings and how often. What we cannot show you is what any particular applicant-tracking system does with them, because we have no visibility into anyone's screening software. Anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.
We rank by the share of a field's postings that contain a term, not by raw count, so one long listing that repeats a word twenty times cannot skew the result. A term at 72% means 72% of the postings in that group used it at least once.
The terms that recur in almost every field
Before the field-specific vocabulary, there is a shared layer. Three terms recur in roughly two of every three postings we read, whatever the role: team, communication, and management. These are the ones people skip because they sound obvious, and they are the easiest to get wrong. Writing "team player" does nothing. Naming the collaboration, the person you worked with, and what came out of it does.
Percentage of all 219 postings containing each term at least once.
| team / teamwork | 72% |
|---|---|
| communication | 66% |
| management / manage | 62% |
| Excel / spreadsheets | 38% |
| attention to detail | 30% |
| problem-solving | 28% |
Source: Cover Letter Keywords by Field, GenerateCoverLetter.com. https://www.generatecoverletter.com/cover-letter-keywords-by-fieldThe field-specific lists
Five fields had enough postings to publish. Each list below is the vocabulary that separates that field from the shared layer above. Jump to yours:
Marketing & communications
19 postingsWorked examples for roles in this group: digital marketing manager, copywriter, social media manager, content writer, marketing manager.
Software & IT
18 postingsThis is our thinnest sample. Eighteen postings is enough to show what recurs, not enough to call it settled, so weigh it accordingly. It is also software and IT specifically: no mechanical, civil, electrical, or chemical engineering postings are in this set, and the terms below would mislead you if you are applying to those.
Worked examples for roles in this group: DevOps engineer, QA engineer, network administrator, database administrator, scrum master, software engineer, web developer, data scientist, data analyst, UX designer, cybersecurity analyst, IT support specialist.
Health administration & operations
38 postingsOur largest sample, and the one whose name we had to correct. These 38 postings are administrative and operational roles in health organizations. Not one clinical term appears in them: no patient, care, clinical, licensure, treatment, medication, or EHR. So this is not a keyword list for nursing, therapy, pharmacy, or dentistry, and we will not present it as one. If you are applying to a clinical role, this sample has nothing to tell you.
Worked examples for roles in this group: medical receptionist.
Administrative & operations
28 postingsWorked examples for roles in this group: data entry clerk, virtual assistant, call center representative, operations analyst, program manager, administrative assistant, executive assistant, office manager, customer service representative, receptionist, operations manager.
Skilled trades & operations
16 postingsSixteen postings, our second-thinnest sample. The terms below are the maintenance and safety language common to trades work, not the certification vocabulary specific to any one trade.
Worked examples for roles in this group: truck driver, warehouse associate, HVAC technician, automotive technician, carpenter, electrician, plumber, welder.
What is not on this page
Finance, education, sales, and pure analyst roles each had fewer than 15 postings in this window. We set 15 as the floor before we looked at the results, and those four did not clear it, so there is no list for them here. A ranked list built on nine postings looks exactly as authoritative as one built on ninety, which is the problem with publishing it.
There is no clinical list either. Our health-sector postings turned out to be administrative and operational roles, with no clinical vocabulary in them at all. Naming that group "Healthcare" and handing a registered nurse a list with no nursing in it would have been the kind of error that is worse than saying nothing, so we renamed the group to what it actually contains.
And there is no claim here about what any screening system does with these words. We counted what employers wrote. That is the whole claim.
Method
The source is a fixed snapshot of job descriptions that real applicants pasted into GenerateCoverLetter.com between 2025/12 and 2026/06. We kept the 219 postings substantial enough to analyze honestly, meaning at least 400 characters, and removed obvious test entries first. Short postings are excluded on purpose: you cannot tell what a job asks for from two sentences.
The pass itself is a document-frequency count over unigrams and bigrams, with stopwords and job-posting boilerplate removed, ranked by the share of a field's postings that contain each term. Postings were grouped into fields first, then counted within each group. It is a fixed snapshot, not a live feed, and the date at the top is the last time the content actually changed.
These figures come from The Cover Letter Reality Report, which also covers how fragmented job titles are across the same corpus. If you want to cite this page, cite it as Generate Cover Letter, August 12, 2026.
Related reading: how to place keywords without stuffing them, formatting a letter that parses cleanly, and worked examples by job title.
If you would rather not cross-check a posting by hand, our generator reads the posting you paste and shows which of its terms your letter already covers. Free to preview