The Resume Host / The screen

Tailoring, and how much is enough

Not a rewrite. A reordering and a handful of substitutions.

The instruction to tailor every application is correct and is usually delivered without saying what tailoring consists of, which leads people either to rewrite from scratch, which is unsustainable, or to change the company name, which achieves nothing.

The useful version is narrow. Read the advertisement for the two or three things it actually requires, as distinct from the long list of desirables. Ensure those appear, in the applicant's own accurate terms, in the top third of the first page. Reorder the bullet points under recent roles so the relevant ones lead. Substitute the terminology where the field uses a different word for the same thing.

That is perhaps twenty minutes per application and it captures most of the available benefit. It is also sustainable across a genuine search, which a full rewrite is not, and sustainability matters because volume with reasonable targeting outperforms perfection with low volume.

The greater return, though, is in the selection of what to apply for. An honest assessment of whether you meet the core requirements saves more time than any amount of editing, and applying widely to roles that are a poor match is the main cause of the demoralising silence that follows.

The other element worth tailoring, and the one most often left generic, is the opening summary. It is the part a scanning reader definitely reads and it is frequently a paragraph of unfalsifiable self-description written once and never revised. Replacing it with three lines specific to this role, naming the relevant experience concretely, is perhaps five minutes and it changes the most-read section of the document.