Every industry has its jargon, and job searching is no exception. The same document is called a CV in Lagos, a resume in New York, and a curriculum vitae in academic Europe. Recruiters talk about ATS, ATS-friendly formats, keyword density, professional summaries, headlines, soft skills, hard skills and a dozen other terms that nobody bothers to define for you. This glossary fixes that. We have collected the 30 words you will see in job descriptions, on hiring panels and in career-advice articles, and explained each one in plain English with examples drawn from the African job market.
The single most useful thing to understand is the difference between a CV and a resume. A CV (curriculum vitae) is the document you build once and update over your career. In Africa, the United Kingdom and most of the Commonwealth, CV is the everyday word for the document you send to apply for a job, and it is usually one to two pages. In the United States and parts of Europe, CV refers specifically to a long academic document and resume is the word for the short, targeted, one-page application document. JobLadda calls our product a CV Maker because that is what our African users search for, but we target the keyword "resume builder" globally because the underlying tool is the same. Whichever word you use, the principles do not change: lead with results, match the keywords in the job description, keep formatting simple enough for an ATS to parse, and tailor the content to one specific role.
ATS stands for Applicant Tracking System. It is the software that sits between you and the human recruiter at most mid-sized and large employers. Greenhouse, Workday, Lever, BambooHR, SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle Taleo are the most common systems you will encounter when applying to roles at Safaricom, MTN, Standard Bank, Flutterwave, Andela and similar companies. The ATS reads your uploaded file, extracts the text, parses sections like Work Experience and Education, and scores how well your CV matches the job description. Common reasons a CV is rejected before a human ever sees it: the file is a scanned image instead of selectable text, the layout uses tables or columns the parser cannot read, the section headings are non-standard ("My Journey" instead of "Work Experience"), or the keywords from the job description are missing entirely.
Hard skills and soft skills come up constantly in job descriptions and feedback. Hard skills are measurable, teachable and verifiable: Python, Excel, financial modelling, IFRS reporting, AutoCAD, SQL, customer support tooling, paid media management. You either have them or you do not, and they are easy to test in an interview. Soft skills are how you operate as a colleague: communication, ownership, ability to handle ambiguity, leadership without authority, conflict resolution. Soft skills are harder to demonstrate on paper, which is why the strongest CVs translate them into observable outcomes. Instead of writing "strong communicator," write "led weekly demos to a 12-person leadership team and reduced cross-team escalations by 40 per cent over six months." That sentence proves the soft skill through a hard outcome.
A few more terms worth knowing before you start applying. A cover letter is the one-page note you attach to your application explaining, in your own voice, why you are a fit for this specific role at this specific company. It is not a recap of your CV. A professional summary is the three to five line paragraph at the top of your resume that pitches your experience and the role you are targeting. A CV headline is one line above the summary, often used by people with senior or specialised profiles. Reverse chronological is the standard CV format, listing your most recent role first. Keyword stuffing is the bad practice of cramming a CV with repeated keywords in an unnatural way to game an ATS. Modern systems flag this and recruiters spot it instantly. The trick is to use the words that actually describe your work, naturally, in context, and to make sure the ones the job description emphasises are present.