What is Keyword Stuffing?

Keyword stuffing is cramming a resume or profile with repeated or hidden search terms in the hope of ranking higher in recruiter searches, from skill lists recycled into every bullet to the old trick of white text on a white background. It backfires for a boring reason: search only shortlists you for a human, and the human then reads what you wrote. Stuffed documents read as spam, and hidden text is exposed the instant an ATS parses the file to plain text or a reviewer highlights the page, at which point the trick reads as dishonesty rather than cleverness. Profiles bloated with buzzwords also match everything weakly instead of something strongly, which is the opposite of how search visibility works. The legitimate version of the same instinct is keyword matching: use the real vocabulary of the target role, once, in truthful context, in the fields that carry weight such as headline, title, and skills. Relevance you can defend in an interview beats density every time. The ATS basics guide draws the line in detail.