Part of the research behind the ATS Resume Keyword Study, but counted separately: these postings come from Lever and Ashby boards as well as Greenhouse, so they are not in the hub's totals.
Keyword study
Adoption is named in 77.7% of 269 customer success postings. The most-named retention metrics, churn and net revenue retention, reach 14.1%.
Have a posting open? Check your resume against it →
Adoption leads renewals and expansion, and the lead holds in the company-level test described in the method section. Renewals (61.7%) and expansion (60.2%) are tied. All four work terms below sit clearly above the most-named measures, churn and net revenue retention.
| Term | Kind | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| adoption | Work | 209 | 77.7% | ±10.4 |
| renewals | Work | 166 | 61.7% | ±11.6 |
| expansion | Work | 162 | 60.2% | ±12.2 |
| onboarding | Work | 100 | 37.2% | ±11.3 |
| churn | Measure | 38 | 14.1% | ±5.7 |
| net revenue retention | Measure | 38 | 14.1% | ±8.9 |
| gross retention | Measure | 14 | 5.2% | ±4.5 |
| ARR / MRR | Measure | 18 | 6.7% | ±5 |
| quota / revenue target | Measure | 26 | 9.7% | ±6.4 |
| health score | Measure | 18 | 6.7% | ±3.9 |
| time to value | Measure | 17 | 6.3% | ±7.7 |
| forecasting | Measure | 36 | 13.4% | ±8 |
The work and measure grouping is this study's own; no posting labels its terms that way. Net revenue retention appears in 38 postings and gross retention in 14. A retention rate on a resume is still evidence; the postings just word the job as adopting, renewing and expanding. If you did that work, use those words first and put the number after them.
These sentences are copied from the postings in the sample, as collected 2026-11-13. Between them they carry the three terms named most: adoption (77.7%), renewals (61.7%) and expansion (60.2%). Use the same words for work you actually did, and put your own figures after them.
| Company | Line from the posting | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Brex | Proactively manage an assigned book of accounts to drive customer adoption, value realization, and account growth. | adoption |
| Samsara | You pick up where our Implementation team leaves off, building the relationship, driving adoption, and ensuring customers realize measurable value from the product. | adoption |
| Okta | Identify renewal risk and collaborate with internal teams to remediate, ensure a successful renewal, and proactively spot expansion opportunities. | renewals, expansion |
| PagerDuty | A track record of taking customers from little use to full use, and of renewal and expansion outcomes you can show. | renewals, expansion |
| GitLab | Own a book of customers and drive adoption, retention, expansion, and overall satisfaction through ongoing strategic and technical engagement. | adoption, expansion |
Try it on your resume
Paste your resume and one customer success posting. You get a match score and a list of the keywords the posting names that your resume is missing.
Check My Resume Against a Customer Success PostingEach bar is the share of the 269 postings that mention the term. The interval beside it is calculated across companies, so it is wider than usual. Rows closer together than the interval are ties.
Tool names are rare. Salesforce is the most-named system at 14.1% (38 postings), clearly ahead of Gainsight at 6.3%. Totango, ChurnZero, Planhat and Vitally together appear in 9 postings (3.3%). A generic CRM reference with no product name is in 28.
| System | Postings | Share | ±95% |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salesforce | 38 | 14.1% | ±7.3 |
| CRM (any) | 28 | 10.4% | ±6.8 |
| Excel / Sheets | 19 | 7.1% | ±4.9 |
| Gainsight | 17 | 6.3% | ±3.6 |
| SQL | 12 | 4.5% | ±4.3 |
| Totango / ChurnZero / Planhat / Vitally | 9 | 3.3% | ±3.8 |
| Zendesk | 5 | 1.9% | ±2 |
| Looker / Tableau | 5 | 1.9% | ±1.6 |
| HubSpot | 3 | 1.1% | ±1.3 |
| Jira | 3 | 1.1% | ±1.4 |
No customer success platform appears in a majority of postings. Name the one you used anyway: a posting that omits Gainsight can still sit on a team that runs on it, and these boards belong to software companies that publish their full descriptions. Customer success roles at agencies, services firms and employers that hire through recruiters are not in this sample.
Two comparisons looked interesting in the raw numbers. With only 61 companies behind them, neither is large enough to rule out chance, so read both as leads.
By title, 78 postings carry a senior, principal, staff, lead, director, head, vice president, chief or leader title; the other 191 do not. Executive relationships are named in 48.7% of the senior postings against 24.1% of the rest, and forecasting in 26.9% against 7.9%. The direction is the same under all 3 definitions of senior that were tried. Adoption, renewals, expansion and onboarding are not among the large gaps, so nothing here suggests the core of the job changes with level.
| Term | Senior titles | Other titles | Difference (95% interval) |
|---|---|---|---|
| executive relationships | 48.7% | 24.1% | +24.6 pts (7.5 to 40.6) |
| cross-functional | 55.1% | 35.6% | +19.5 pts (0.1 to 38.1) |
| forecasting | 26.9% | 7.9% | +19.1 pts (5 to 34.4) |
| escalation | 43.6% | 25.1% | +18.5 pts (0.3 to 35.1) |
| Salesforce | 26.9% | 8.9% | +18 pts (3 to 35.3) |
| technical aptitude | 34.6% | 16.8% | +17.9 pts (-0.3 to 36.3) |
By board vendor, 167 postings come from Greenhouse companies and 102 from Lever and Ashby companies. Quarterly or executive business reviews are named in 37.7% of the first group and 15.7% of the second, against 29.4% overall. Part of that may be seniority: 33.5% of the Greenhouse postings carry a senior title against 21.6% of the others. Among non-senior titles alone the business-review shares are 35.1% and 12.5%. Read the overall percentages on this page as a description of this mix of 61 companies.
| Term | Greenhouse | Lever and Ashby | Difference (95% interval) |
|---|---|---|---|
| implementation | 31.1% | 58.8% | -27.7 pts (-48.9 to -2.5) |
| QBR / EBR | 37.7% | 15.7% | +22 pts (5.2 to 35.5) |
| bachelor's degree | 31.1% | 10.8% | +20.4 pts (-6.9 to 44.1) |
| playbooks | 25.7% | 45.1% | -19.3 pts (-41.5 to 8.8) |
| executive relationships | 37.1% | 21.6% | +15.6 pts (0.7 to 31.2) |
The test behind this is described in the method section.
| Group | Term | Postings | Share | ±95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Account management | adoption | 209 | 77.7% | ±10.4 |
| implementation | 112 | 41.6% | ±13.2 | |
| onboarding | 100 | 37.2% | ±11.3 | |
| playbooks | 89 | 33.1% | ±12.8 | |
| executive relationships | 84 | 31.2% | ±8.3 | |
| escalation | 82 | 30.5% | ±8.6 | |
| QBR / EBR | 79 | 29.4% | ±9 | |
| success plans | 78 | 29% | ±11.7 | |
| product feedback | 73 | 27.1% | ±11.1 | |
| book of business | 67 | 24.9% | ±8.8 | |
| voice of customer | 40 | 14.9% | ±8.7 | |
| health score | 18 | 6.7% | ±3.9 | |
| time to value | 17 | 6.3% | ±7.7 | |
| Retention & revenue | renewals | 166 | 61.7% | ±11.6 |
| expansion | 162 | 60.2% | ±12.2 | |
| churn | 38 | 14.1% | ±5.7 | |
| net revenue retention | 38 | 14.1% | ±8.9 | |
| upsell / cross-sell | 36 | 13.4% | ±7.4 | |
| forecasting | 36 | 13.4% | ±8 | |
| quota / revenue target | 26 | 9.7% | ±6.4 | |
| ARR / MRR | 18 | 6.7% | ±5 | |
| gross retention | 14 | 5.2% | ±4.5 | |
| Customer segment | SaaS | 140 | 52% | ±14.1 |
| enterprise | 139 | 51.7% | ±11.3 | |
| strategic accounts | 40 | 14.9% | ±6 | |
| mid-market | 28 | 10.4% | ±6.6 | |
| SMB | 11 | 4.1% | ±3.1 | |
| Tools | Salesforce | 38 | 14.1% | ±7.3 |
| CRM (any) | 28 | 10.4% | ±6.8 | |
| Excel / Sheets | 19 | 7.1% | ±4.9 | |
| Gainsight | 17 | 6.3% | ±3.6 | |
| SQL | 12 | 4.5% | ±4.3 | |
| Totango / ChurnZero / Planhat / Vitally | 9 | 3.3% | ±3.8 | |
| Zendesk | 5 | 1.9% | ±2 | |
| Looker / Tableau | 5 | 1.9% | ±1.6 | |
| HubSpot | 3 | 1.1% | ±1.3 | |
| Jira | 3 | 1.1% | ±1.4 | |
| Skills & background | cross-functional | 111 | 41.3% | ±11.6 |
| language fluency | 84 | 31.2% | ±12.1 | |
| travel | 72 | 26.8% | ±9.8 | |
| bachelor's degree | 63 | 23.4% | ±14.7 | |
| technical aptitude | 59 | 21.9% | ±11.7 | |
| project management | 31 | 11.5% | ±7.8 |
Boards. The role studies in the hub were collected from a different, smaller set of boards. This one adds Lever and Ashby (33 Greenhouse, 5 Lever and 23 Ashby companies here), which took the sample from 167 postings on Greenhouse alone to 269. A company on more than one vendor is read from Greenhouse only. The Lever and Ashby boards were found by trying company names, so they are not a list of every employer on those vendors.
Titles. Any title containing “customer success” or “client success”: managers, associates, architects, business partners, directors and heads. 21 matching postings were dropped because the job is a different one: customer success engineers, operations and analyst roles, administrators, strategy and planning roles, product marketing, and a sales engineer titled “Sales Engineer (Customer Success)”. Titles with no “success” in them, such as technical account manager, renewals manager and onboarding specialist, were left out even though that makes the sample smaller.
Terms. “Adoption” is tested after removing benefits wording such as “fertility and adoption assistance.” “Vitally” is matched case-sensitively, since the lowercase word is an adverb. “Catalyst” is also a customer success platform but is left out: “General Catalyst” is an investor named in company descriptions, and the two could not be told apart. “Travel” skips “travel software.” “Language fluency” counts any stated language requirement, English included.
What a figure means. A share counts the postings, out of these 269, that mention the term one or more times. It does not tell you how many employers want the term, where an ATS draws its cutoff, or whether you would get an interview. A term outside the list was never counted, so a blank says nothing about it. The postings were collected on a single day, from software and technology companies.
Intervals. Postings from one company are not independent: the largest employer supplies 7.8% of the sample and repeats boilerplate across its postings. The intervals here therefore come from resampling companies (4,000 draws, fixed seed), and run from ±1.3 to ±14.7 points. Adoption's is ±10.4; treating postings as independent would give ±5. The role studies in the hub use that narrower, independent-postings interval, so these intervals are not comparable to theirs. Group comparisons use the same resampling, then adjust for the 43 terms tested (Benjamini-Hochberg, false discovery rate 5%). Comparing so many terms means some gaps clear an unadjusted 95% interval by chance: 9 of the 43 seniority comparisons do, where chance alone would give about 2. After the adjustment 0 seniority gaps and 0 vendor gaps remain, which is why the section above treats both as leads.
airtable · amplitude · anaplan · anthropic · arcadia · asana · ashby · benchling · billtrust · bitgo · blend · braze · brex · carta · checkr · clickup · cohere · coursera · cultureamp · datadog · dnb · doximity · dropbox · figma · flock · gitlab · gympass · harvey · hinge-health · hive · impact · instacart · intercom · justworks · launchdarkly · linear · miro · mixpanel · mongodb · notion · okta · openai · outreach · oyster · pagerduty · perplexity · pleo · posthog · ramp · ripple · samsara · sentry · sisense · skydio · stripe · twilio · vanta · veeva · watershed · whoop · zocdoc
Across 269 postings from 61 companies, the terms named most are adoption (77.7%), renewals (61.7%), expansion (60.2%), SaaS (52%) and enterprise (51.7%). Adoption, renewals and expansion are the three that describe the work; SaaS and enterprise describe the kind of company and account.
Rarely: Salesforce appears in 14.1% of the postings and Gainsight in 6.3%. Totango, ChurnZero, Planhat and Vitally together appear in 3.3%. No customer success platform is named in a majority of postings, and these boards belong to software companies, so the figures do not describe agencies or services firms.
Less often than they name the work. Churn and net revenue retention are each named in 14.1% of postings, against 77.7% for adoption and 61.7% for renewals. A retention rate on a resume is still evidence; the postings mostly describe the work in words.
Possibly, but this sample cannot confirm it. Executive relationships are named in 48.7% of senior-titled postings against 24.1% of the others, and forecasting in 26.9% against 7.9%.
Open postings with "customer success" or "client success" in the title were read from public job boards on 2026-11-13: 167 from Greenhouse, 24 from Lever and 78 from Ashby. Duplicates were removed, and 21 matching titles that are a different job, such as customer success engineers and operations analysts, were dropped.
Before you hit apply
Most postings in this sample are built around adoption and renewals; some senior ones add executive relationships and forecasting. Paste yours and see which words it uses.
Check My Resume Against a Customer Success PostingClosest vocabulary elsewhere in the research: account executive postings, which share the renewal, forecasting and Salesforce vocabulary · product manager postings, where the feedback customers give and the cross-functional work share a posting
Published 2026-11-13 from postings collected the same day: 269 postings, 61 companies, 43 terms, method v1.0. The analysis script and the collector are published as plain text. Data license: CC BY 4.0.
ResumeFitting, “Customer Success Job Description Keywords: 269 Postings Counted” (method v1.0, data collected 2026-11-13). https://resumefitting.com/customer-success-job-description-keywords