QA vacancies almost always specify manual, automation, or the ratio between them — and screen on exactly that. The resume's job is to make your ratio, your tools, and your defect numbers scannable in one pass.
Keywords that appear in QA Engineer job descriptions
- test cases
- manual testing
- test automation
- Selenium
- Playwright
- Cypress
- API testing
- Postman
- regression testing
- exploratory testing
- Jira
- CI/CD
- SQL
- bug reporting
- performance testing
Use only the keywords that are true for your experience — screening software matches them, but humans read them.
How to rewrite your bullets for a QA Engineer job
Generic
Tested application features before release.
Tailored
Designed and ran 300+ test cases per release for a payments web app, catching 40+ pre-release defects per cycle.
Generic
Worked on test automation.
Tailored
Automated the smoke suite in Playwright (120 tests), cutting regression time from 2 days to 3 hours.
The numbers above are placeholders — swap in your real ones.
Common QA Engineer resume mistakes
- Hiding your manual vs automation ratio — vacancies specify which they need, and vagueness fails both.
- No defect or coverage numbers: cases per release, bugs caught, regression time saved.
- Tools listed with nothing built in them — 'Playwright' means little without the suite you wrote.
Summary line patterns
- QA engineer, 4 years: manual plus Playwright automation for web apps, embedded in agile teams.
- QA moving into automation: strong exploratory testing, growing JavaScript test stack.
Knockout requirements to check before applying
- Automation experience as hard requirement
- ISTQB or certifications listed as must-have
- The vacancy's tool stack
- Work authorization