How to tailor your CV to a job description

Tailoring does not mean rewriting your CV for every application. It means changing four or five things so the reader recognises their own job in it. Twenty minutes, and it beats a hundred generic submissions.

Read the advert as a checklist

Print it, or paste it somewhere you can mark up. Then separate:

• Must-haves — usually under "requirements", often with years attached
• Nice-to-haves — "desirable", "advantageous"
• The vocabulary — the specific words they use for the work

That third one matters more than people expect. If the advert says "stakeholder management" and your CV says "client liaison", a keyword filter finds nothing, and a human skimming for a match has to work harder than they will.

Use their words, where they are true

This is the line worth being careful about. If you have done the work, use their term for it. If you have not, do not write it.

Legitimate: your CV says "customer support", the advert says "client success", you did the same job — change the wording.

Not legitimate: the advert says Kubernetes, you have never used Kubernetes, and you add it because a filter might look for it. That gets found out in the first technical conversation, and it is the reason keyword-stuffing advice is bad advice.

Change these four things

1. The last sentence of your summary. Name the role you are applying for.
2. The order of your bullets. Move whatever matches the advert's first requirement to the top of your most recent role.
3. Your skills list. Reorder so their must-haves appear first. Cut anything irrelevant to this application.
4. Which projects appear. Show the ones closest to their work; hide the rest.

Notice what does not change: your history, your dates, your achievements. You are re-presenting, not re-inventing.

Check the overlap

Paste the advert into the ATS checker alongside your CV. It lists the advert's most frequent terms and shows which ones your CV uses.

Treat the misses as a prompt, not a shopping list. For each one, ask whether you have done that work under a different name. If yes, change your wording. If no, leave it — and consider whether this is the right application.

Keep a master version

Maintain one long CV with everything, then duplicate and cut per application. Cutting is faster than remembering, and you will not lose an achievement because you tailored it away two months ago.

In the builder, sections can be hidden rather than deleted — so a project you switch off for one application is still there for the next.

When not to bother

If you would not take the job, do not spend the twenty minutes. Tailoring is expensive enough that it is worth applying to fewer roles properly than many carelessly — and a targeted CV is the reason the response rate differs so sharply between the two approaches.