How to Tailor a Resume to a Job Description

Sending the same document to forty postings is why the replies stop. Tailoring does not mean rewriting, and it should take about twenty minutes.

From the team behind PassATS. Free to read, no email required.

Start by reading the posting as a checklist

Copy the posting into a plain document. Highlight every hard requirement: named tools, years of experience, certifications, a degree if one is genuinely required.

Those are the terms that get matched literally. Everything else in the posting is atmosphere.

Sort them into three piles

Have it and said it. Nothing to do.

Have it and did not say it. This is where nearly all your gain is. You know the tool, you used it for two years, and it appears nowhere on the page. Add it, in the role where you actually used it.

Do not have it. Leave it alone. Do not claim it, do not pad around it. If it is a hard requirement you genuinely lack, the honest read is that this posting is a poor use of your twenty minutes.

Rewrite three bullets, not the whole thing

Pick the three bullets closest to what the posting emphasises and rewrite those to use its language, where the language is true of what you did.

A posting that keeps saying "experimentation" while your bullet says "ran A/B tests" is a match a human sees and a matcher misses. Say both.

Reorder before you rewrite

Within a role, bullets do not have to stay in the order you first wrote them. Move the most relevant one to the top.

Same content, better first impression, and it costs thirty seconds.

What not to do

Do not paste the posting into your resume in white text. It is visible to anyone who selects the page, and it ends the application on integrity rather than fit.

Do not invent a number to match a claim. Made-up metrics fall apart in the first interview, which is a worse outcome than not getting one.

Do not tailor the summary and forget the Skills section. They are the two densest places, and a mismatch between them reads as carelessness.