How to Customize your Resume for a Particular Job Description

It’s likely that you have seen numerous tips to customize your Resume for each job if you have read any kind of resume advice online.

Is it truly required, you may be thinking?

Since it does take time, it might be tempting to avoid it.

However, it will significantly impact how many businesses call you back and invite you to an interview.

I’m referring to a sharp surge of callbacks. Not a minor uptick. I’ve tried both.

Additionally, personalizing your resume is easier than it may seem. I’ll walk you step-by-step through it. However, please read the next part first because it’s crucial.

The Problem With Not Tailoring Your Resume:

The majority of job seekers write resumes in an effort to appear as impressive as possible. But, especially initially, a recruiting manager isn’t seeking that.

They are not rating your ability to make an impression, your intelligence, or anything similar. They are comparing your resume to the job description to determine if you have the qualifications necessary for this particular position and want to see proof that you can work hard right away after being hired.

You are not accomplishing what the employer is looking for when you produce a broad resume with the intention of showcasing all of your great experience.

There is a disconnect, which prevents callbacks from happening.

All of this occurred as a result of the focus on YOU in your resume.

Your CV becomes about THEM when you customize it for a certain position. And that’s how you land the job!

How To Tailor Your Resume to a Job:

1. Identify what’s most important to the company

Adapting your CV to the job description is the key to making it appealing to an employer. You can utilize the job description to determine their requirements and priorities, then reflect those in your CV.

What to watch for:

• What obligations are brought up first? What is mentioned below and perhaps isn’t as crucial?
• What qualities or prerequisites are listed specifically?
• Are there any recurring themes? (such as initiative, multitasking, planning, etc.)

2. Match your resume content with the job description

Examine your CV now that you have a better understanding of what the firm is seeking.

Matching the most significant elements of the job description with the portions of your resume that are most visible will help you personalize your resume to the position.

On your CV, try to be as relevant as you can with the first few bullet points under each former position. One of the first places recruiters and hiring managers will look at your resume is your career history, making it one of the most crucial sections to customize.

Instead, you can adapt your schooling and other relevant experience if you’re seeking your first job. The same idea.

Don’t start off with all of your individual successes if the job description places a strong emphasis on leadership. Put a bullet point that lists any leading you’ve done in its place. taking the initiative on projects, mentoring, and managing people. Find any manner, no matter how tiny, to show leadership!

After that, you can mention your own accomplishments.

Perhaps the individual component made up 90% of your previous role while leadership made up only 10%. It makes no difference; start with the leadership, as the job description did.

Be sure to customize each position if your resume lists more than one.

Make sure to customize your resume’s objective and summary sections as well. Compare your summary to the company’s description of the overall function before submitting it.

3. Reorder, add, remove

What I’ve just described can be done in a few different ways.

You might start by rearranging the information and bullet points you already have. Move the most pertinent experience to the top of each section and place other, less pertinent information below down.

It’s easier to start with this, so I’ll do that. There is no need to write anything; you are simply copying and pasting various bits.

You can then add new bullet points. You might see something on the job description and then realize that while it is something you do have some expertise with, it is not listed on your CV. Add it then!

Finally, if the information has become redundant as a result of the new bullet points you’ve added or if it is just irrelevant, you can remove or delete it.

Here’s how to decide whether to take things out: Consider whether any of the information you supplied may cause a corporation to be perplexed.

Perhaps you should eliminate it if you anticipate that the hiring manager will query why this information was deemed necessary to include.

Alternatively, you can remove some of your older bullet points to create a way for the new, customized information you’re including.

As the last point, you can even rearrange entire portions of your resume.

Example: Moving your “Education” section above or below your “Employment” section. For most cases, you’d want it below. As a general rule of thumb, the first thing a hiring manager wants to see is your most recent experience.

Therefore, the less digging they have to do, the better!

However, I am aware that there are positions where a hiring manager cannot even consider doing an interview with you unless they can verify that you have the appropriate formal education and experience. pilots, nurses, etc.

In that situation, you might think about prioritizing your schooling. Using the job description as a guide, use your best judgment. Did they state these requirements immediately away? Or was it tacked on at the very end?

4. Provide compelling evidence

Not every bullet point is made equally. Let’s imagine you discover that the job you’re applying for requires a lot of multitasking, and you decide to adjust your resume accordingly.

Do you believe that including “great multi-tasker” in your professional summary will be sufficient to make an impression?

Do you believe the hiring manager will be impressed by your most recent job’s one bullet point, “often needed to multi-task”?

No way!

You must be specific with facts, statistics, stories, and examples. Something that demonstrates to the hiring staff is that you can start this job right away and be productive in it.

For the aforementioned scenario, here is what you could write as a bullet point: “Managed four or five projects at once, including all deadlines, objectives, and outcomes. As new projects were started, scheduling adjustments were frequently needed.

That is persuading!

Other examples of stats and information include:

• Percentages (a % increase in sales, a % growth you contributed to, etc.)
• Dollar amounts (managed $___ worth of customer accounts, $___ worth of projects, $___ advertising budget, team budget, etc.)
• The number of people (trained 4 new employees, interacted with up to 10 suppliers on a daily basis, etc.)
• Geography (managed work for various clients across 4 continents)

5. Review everything

When you are confident that you have addressed every need in the job description on your resume, act as the hiring manager would.

Examine the job description while placing your resume next to it. Is everything logical and in place? Will the employer be able to properly understand your motivation for applying for this position and your areas of interest?

Or are they going to remark, “I wonder why this person thought to apply here,” instead?

Avoiding that is what you want to do!

Tailoring Your Resume to a Job Will Also Help You in the Interview

If you take the above-mentioned actions, you’ll be far more prepared for the interview than the other applicants.

Your interview replies will be more focused because you’ll be more aware of the requirements of the position and the employer.

When they ask you to “tell me about yourself,” for instance, you will be able to concentrate on what is most pertinent to their position rather than merely listing random facts or bits of work experience. You can discuss the skills and achievements that most clearly show you’ll be able to succeed in your position!

You’ll receive a lot more employment offers as a result!

So learning how to modify your resume for each position won’t simply help you land more interviews; it’ll also help you convert those interviews into job offers.

What to Do Next

Here’s a fantastic way to begin going: For a position, you wish to apply for, locate one job description. Look for something “middle of the road” and typical for the kind of employment you’re after. This is crucial as we’ll be making a “master copy” of your resume.

Utilizing the guidelines above, adapt your CV to the position description you just discovered, and then save the document. Your master copy for this employment search is that document.

Use that file as a starting point when you apply for more positions.

From one work to the next, you might only need to make one or two minor tweaks.

Of course, there are situations when more is required, and it is always worthwhile.

Last but not least, if you’re applying for various jobs, make a master copy for each. When I was deciding whether to stay in the recruiting industry or go into corporate sales a few years ago, I was in this situation. My basic resume, which was somewhat targeted to both sectors, was receiving zero responses.

I was slack, I’ll admit it. In order to appeal to every employer in two quite different fields of employment, I tried to make one generic resume! I reasoned that if I split the difference, I would have just enough to satisfy everyone.

It was a terrible idea that failed. I didn’t win any fans.

The truth is that if you try to make your resume perfect for every position available, it won’t be. You must customize it.

Until I made two distinct resumes, my job hunt didn’t provide any results. Then, after further customizing my resume using the aforementioned technique, things really took off… From having no callbacks, I had 10+ the following week.

Leave a question in the comments section below if you have any!