How to tailor a resume to a job description

Most people are given the advice, “add keywords from the posting,” which is true in the same way that “write good code” is true. It tells you what to achieve, but not the actual process, and when followed literally it creates a laundry list of skills in your resume that are not things you have actually done. This is the actual process:

1. Note what the posting focuses on

A job posting is written by several different people and then edited lightly. What makes it into the final version, the version you see listed under the title, again in the first responsibility, and again in the requirements, is what is actually important about the role. Everything else in there is filler or inherited from an earlier version of the role at the same company.

Read through once, and circle everything that comes up at least twice. On most postings, this will result in 4–7 points to address in your resume. Those are the ones the hiring manager is looking for. If something is listed only once, near the bottom in the “nice to have” section, you shouldn’t waste any space claiming it.

Note the wording in particular. Saying you are responsible for “owning”, “operating”, and “maintaining” production systems is very different from saying you are able to “design”, “launch”, and “scope” projects, and your history can honestly be written in either light depending on what the posting is looking for.

2. Map each one to something you actually did

For every point in your list from step 1, find the specific thing in your history that is relevant. Not a skill that you could claim, but a specific achievement with a time and a place.

The most common gap between a resume and a job posting is not that the applicant lacked the experience, but that they didn’t phrase their experience in the same way. The person that ran the on-call rotation will see it described as “production ownership” in the posting. The person that wrote the runbook that everyone uses will see it described as “operational documentation” in the posting. These are the same thing! If you only add one thing to your resume, add the ability to reword your past experience in the language used by the company that is hiring.

If one point in your list from step 1 doesn’t map to a real thing you’ve done, don’t add it to your resume. A resume that includes experience that you can’t defend in an interview is worse than one that lacks some skills.

3. Rewrite four places, in this order

Tailoring is only about changing a few things. Everything else stays exactly the same, which is what makes 15 minutes a reasonable amount of time for the process.

The summary

This is the highest-leverage line on the page and is usually the weakest, because most summaries are adjectives. “Passionate, results-driven professional who thrives in fast-paced environments” describes nobody, and a recruiter has read it four hundred times.

Instead, name the two or three things from your list, from step 1. Do not pad with filler. Do not pad with adjectives. Do not pad with things you did at previous companies. The summary is a lie if it doesn’t show up in the experience section as well. Not “strong communicator with a passion for data” but “six years building reporting pipelines for finance teams; owned the migration off nightly batch to streaming.” The second one is unmistakably about a person.

The first two bullets of your most recent role

Almost nobody reads bullet six. Order the bullets so that the two that answer the job posting come first, and rewrite them to lead with the outcome rather than the task. “Responsible for the checkout service” is a job title repeated; “owned checkout end to end, from schema design through on-call” is the same job described by someone who did it.

The skills section

This is where the honest version of “add keywords” comes into play. If the posting asks for Postgres and you have used Postgres in a bullet above, it belongs in your skills list. Adding it there is not a new claim; it is making an existing one findable.

Remove things that aren’t relevant as well. “Microsoft Office” and “Teamwork” cost you a line and tell a payments team nothing.

One thing to cut

Tailoring adds length, and length pushes you onto a second page, which is where resumes go to be skimmed. Find the bullet with the least to do with this posting, usually a side project or work in a different discipline, and remove it. Not from your master copy; from this version.

4. Check coverage, then stop

Go back to your list from step 1 and check that every item has been addressed in your resume. That is the only check you need to do. If you want it done mechanically, we have a free checker that scores your resume against a posting by counting term coverage and lists what is missing — no account required.

Then stop. The returns fall off a cliff after the four changes above, and the time is better spent on the next application.

Keep the version you sent

The part that everyone forgets. Three weeks later you get a call about a role you barely remember applying to, and the resume in front of them is not the one on your desktop. Save each tailored version with the company name on it, or use something like this that does it for you — walking into an interview knowing exactly what you claimed is worth more than any single bullet you wrote.

What tailoring cannot do

It cannot make you a plausible candidate for a job you are not qualified for, and no amount of vocabulary matching will. What it does is stop you from being filtered out of jobs you are qualified for because your resume called the work something different from what the posting called it. This happens, and this is fixable, and that is the only problem tailoring actually solves.

Formatting your resume like it is a log of things you’ve been responsible for, without any outcome, is what separates a candidate who is hired and a candidate who is rejected in every technical field. If every bullet on your resume starts with a verb, you are not giving evidence about yourself, you are just restating your job description to the person who is trying to evaluate you.