It can get you retrieved in a search and dropped in the read, which is a bad trade. Keyword matching helps recruiters find you in the database. But a human opens what the search returns, and a skills section with forty unexplained terms reads as noise.
Stuffing misunderstands what the keyword is for. The recruiter search is a retrieval step; the decision happens during a first human scan of about 7 seconds, per a Ladders eye-tracking study. A wall of comma-separated terms spends that scan proving nothing.
Use each important keyword once, where it works: inside a bullet with an action and an outcome attached. One line that names the skill and shows it in use beats the same word repeated in a block that everyone has learned to skip.
“Getting found by the search and dropped by the reader is the full-service version of losing.”
Gabe, Pursuit's truth-teller
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