How to tailor your resume to a job posting

Sending the same resume to forty postings is faster. It’s also the reason most of them go quiet. Tailoring is less work than it sounds once you know which parts actually change.

Why it’s worth the half hour

Applications are growing four times faster than job openings, so every posting has a deeper pile behind it than it did two years ago.

A tailored resume is how yours gets out of that pile, because it’s made of your work and this posting. Nobody else can send the same one.

Read the posting for what it’s asking

Go through it once and mark only the concrete asks. A licence. A certification. A piece of equipment you have to have used. A number of years. Those are the lines the screening actually runs on, and they’re the ones your resume has to answer.

The softer lines about being a self-starter aren’t worth a rewrite. Nobody screens on them.

Borrow the posting’s words, never its claims

If the posting says inventory reconciliation and you’d have written stock counts, use theirs. The wording matters twice over. It’s what the employer’s software scans for, and the person reading afterwards is looking for the same phrases.

But this is where people wreck a good application. Borrow the wording for work you have done. If you haven’t done it, it doesn’t go on the page, no matter how neatly the posting asks for it.

Keep it in date order, oldest last

Skills-only resumes still get recommended, and they cost you. Application systems score your experience out of dated job entries, so when your abilities sit in clusters with no employer and no dates attached, there’s nothing there for the scoring to read. Jobscan and Indeed both put reverse-chronological first for the same reason.

Standard headings help too, and so does keeping your contact details in the body of the page rather than in a header or a sidebar, where some systems never look.

Give your current job the most room

A resume isn’t an archive. The job you’re in now can carry up to eight bullets. The one before it, three or four. Anything further back gets two or three, and only if those two are answering something the posting asked for.

Say the number

Responsible for inventory tells an employer nothing they didn’t already assume from the job title. Counted a 4,000 item stockroom every Monday and kept it within 2 percent tells them the size of room you can run.

You don’t need a number on every line. You need one on the lines where the posting is asking how big, how many, or how often.

Cut the words that stopped meaning anything

Some words have been used so heavily in resumes that they carry no information any more. Leveraged. Results-driven. Impactful. Dynamic. Passionate about excellence.

Here’s the test. Take the word out. If the sentence still says exactly the same thing, the word wasn’t doing a job, and the space belongs to a fact instead.

Then do it again for the next posting

Keep one master resume with everything you’ve ever done on it, far too long to send. Each application is a copy of that, cut down and re-pointed at one posting. The second one takes twenty minutes. The tenth takes ten.

Read next: How to tell if a job posting is real.

Sources.
Workday Global Workforce Report, September 2024, on applications growing four times faster than openings in the first half of 2024. investor.workday.com
On reverse-chronological order and application systems. jobscan.co and indeed.com
The bullet counts are our own rule for how we write resumes, not a finding from a study.