Why tailor your resume to each role?
Having an up-to-date resume is essential when looking for work. But your resume is more than a list of skills and past jobs. It’s an opportunity to highlight your strengths and the results that matter to a specific employer. For the best chance of being noticed, make sure you tailor your resume (and cover letter) to each job you apply for.
What do we mean by tailoring your resume?
Tailoring means looking at the requirements of a role and adjusting your resume to highlight your most relevant skills, experience, attributes and strengths that would be valuable to that employer.
Avoid the disappointment of rejection (or silence) from employers when your ‘general’ resume misses the mark. Tailoring your resume to the role shows you’re paying attention to the employer’s needs and gives them plenty of reasons to invite you to an interview.
[Resume or CV (curriculum vitae)? I’ll sometimes use “CV” as short for “resume” as these terms are commonly used interchangeably.]
Resume layout: start with a clear structure
Recommended structure for your resume:
- Name and Contact details
- Professional Summary or Profile (1 paragraph)
- Key Skills
- Experience (incl Responsibilities/ Achievements)
- Qualifications and Training
- Certificates and Licences
- References (usually, “Referees available on request”)
A clear layout helps an employer learn about you easily
Help an employer to find what they’re looking for in the sections they expect to see, so they can easily compare candidates against their list of requirements.
Using a dot point format for your skills, responsibilities, and achievements makes your resume:
- easy to skim,
- quick to tailor to each role by adding/deleting items as needed, and
- easy to reorder your points to match each employer’s priorities.
Plain layout is best for automated scanning as well as human readers
During recruitment screening, an employer might use AI to scan for resumes that match their requirements enough for closer consideration. Using a custom-designed layout with text in columns or boxes might affect the scanning process, making your key information harder to find, and might prevent your application progressing through to shortlisting.
When employers are skimming resumes quickly, a document with graphics, multiple or low-contrast colours, or columns, can be distracting and take longer to read.
Your resume needs to provide the most relevant information that matches the employer’s requirements, and make it easy for humans and scanners to read.
Emphasise what makes you suitable for the role
At the start of your resume, your Professional Summary and Key Skills sections:
- give an employer an overall impression of who you are, and
- highlight what you want the employer to know about you
…in relation to the role you’re applying for.
Creating a strong first impression is what makes the employer keen to read further.
You can imagine the employer saying, “This seems like the person I’ve been looking for”.
Then in your employment history, you can provide full descriptions of the most relevant roles and offer less detail about jobs that are less relevant, so the employer sees what matters to them.
If it’s not relevant, leave it out (or make it less prominent)
We often try to include every possible skill, ability, or achievement we’ve ever had, to try to sound more impressive. But if an employer doesn’t need that information about you for their role, then it’s just more noise in the way of them getting to the important points.
You could write out all your information in a ‘master’ CV, then tailor to specific roles by deleting what’s not relevant, or adjusting the amount of detail, according to the job ad.
Choose your top “Hard” / “Soft” / “Transferable” skills
Employers are seeking all-round professional skills, so make sure you include more than technical expertise in your Key Skills list.
Include a mix of “hard” and “soft” skills:
Hard: technical capabilities and skills related to a specific industry.
Soft: what we might call general professional skills, for example communication, organisation, teamwork.
Transferable skills are those developed in any field, such as in volunteer work, study, community activities, or family responsibilities, that you can bring to a new role. New graduate? Returning to work? Changing fields? Consider all the skills you have acquired across your life.
It’s best to keep your list to around 6 to 8 skills that are most relevant to the role.
You might put a full list of Technical Competencies, such as expertise in varied software, below your Qualifications and Training, and only refer to the tools and platforms listed in the job ad in your Key Skills.
Explain how your skills are important to the role
Present your skills as more than just a “shopping list” of terms – put them in a sentence for context.
For example, your customer service skills could relate to engaging positively with customers, or meeting production/delivery deadlines for customer satisfaction. Help the employer to understand how you have applied your skills in your work and how that matters to them.
Consider the strengths and attributes that set you apart
Your application is being compared to several others who have the capabilities required to do the job. So, what sets you apart from other candidates? Why would the employer choose you?
This is about more than meeting the list of requirements in the job ad.
Think about what you are known for and highlight the unique strengths you can bring to the role.
We often don’t notice our own strengths! Try asking a friend or trusted colleague for an objective perspective.
Need help putting your strengths into words? Book in for a chat
Incorporate keywords from the job ad
… where they match your capabilities.
Use ‘keywords’, the terms the employer uses in their job ad or position description, throughout your application.
Be careful not to copy the entire ad wording directly – an exact match wouldn’t be realistic and may be dismissed by an employer as it doesn’t sound genuine!
Work the terms into your own sentences.
Tip: AI tools are often used to scan for keywords and rank how well applicants match the requirements. Using keywords also helps human readers skimming your resume. Ensure the employer sees a lot of what they expect from an ideal applicant who meets their needs.
Tailored resume for the win!
Your resume is an opportunity to showcase your suitability for a specific job. When you emphasise your most relevant experience, skills, and attributes for the role, you’re making it easy for the employer to see what matters to them, and highlighting how you’re the most suitable candidate.
What part of preparing your resume do you find most challenging? I’d love to hear. Perhaps I can help. Feel free to get in touch.
I’m Jenny Lindsay, a compassionate job search mentor helping people navigate career transitions to obtain meaningful work. During my 20+ year professional career, I’ve worked across public and private sector roles, studied HR Management and Marketing and established my business supporting clients to identify their unrecognised strengths and access new opportunities. I bring curiosity and empathy to help people learn what employers are looking for and to promote themselves as suitable candidates for their ideal role.