Tailor your CV to a job description, without stretching it

Tailoring a CV has a bad reputation because people confuse it with dressing things up. It is the opposite. A tailored CV contains the same facts as your general one. It simply puts the facts this employer cares about where they will be seen.

Here is how to do it for one posting.

List what the posting asks for

Go through the posting and write every requirement on its own line. Include the obvious ones, such as years of experience and tools, and the quieter ones hidden in the responsibilities, such as "presents results to management".

Mark each one as a must or a nice to have. The posting usually tells you. Words like "required" and "essential" are musts. "Ideally" and "a plus" are not.

Check each one against what you have done

For every line, write the evidence from your own history. Be specific. "Managed a team" is weak evidence. "Led four people for two years on the billing project" is strong.

You will end up with three groups:

• Covered. You have clear evidence.
• Partly covered. You have done something close, or less of it.
• Missing. You have not done it.

This list is worth more than the CV itself. It tells you whether to apply, and it tells you what the interviewer will ask.

Reorder before you rewrite

Most tailoring is ordering. Within each job, move the points that match this posting to the top. In your summary, lead with the experience that matters most here. In your skills, put the ones they named first.

A recruiter gives a CV a short first look. In a 2018 eye-tracking study by the job site Ladders it averaged 7.4 seconds, as HR Dive reported. What sits at the top of each section is what gets read.

Reword only where it is still true

If the posting says "customer onboarding" and you called the same work "client setup", use their term. It is the same thing and it helps the reader recognise it.

The line is simple. You may change the word for something you did. You may not change what you did. If the wording would make a careful reader think you have experience you do not have, leave it.

Deal with the gaps honestly

For a partly covered requirement, say exactly what you did. "Basic SQL for monthly reports" is better than "SQL", because it survives the first follow-up question.

For a missing requirement, do nothing in the CV. Do not hint, and do not list a tool you opened once. If it is a must and you do not have it, think about whether this is the right job. If it is a nice to have, be ready to say how you would learn it.

Cut what does not help

A tailored CV is often shorter. If a point has nothing to do with this job, it can go or shrink to one line. Keep the dates and titles intact so there are no holes in your history, and let the detail go.

Read it as the recruiter

Finally, read the posting once more and then your CV, top to bottom, in under a minute. Ask one question: would I see the match? If the answer depends on something in the middle of page two, move it up.

Sources

• HR Dive, Eye tracking study shows recruiters look at resumes for 7 seconds, on the Ladders 2018 eye-tracking study

Where JobUncover fits

JobUncover does this comparison for you. You upload your CV once and paste a posting. It shows a fit score and marks each requirement as covered, partly covered or missing. Where something is missing it asks you instead of guessing, and then it builds a tailored CV only from what is in your profile, as DOCX and PDF.