How do you tailor your CV to a job posting?

A CV tells a career; a posting describes a need. The two never overlap completely. For a given application, part of your experience is decisive and part is beside the point — and that split changes from one advert to the next.

A generic CV leaves the sorting to the reader. A recruiter going through forty applications will not do it, and the software ranking them even less. Tailoring means doing that sorting for them.

Not every line of a posting carries the same weight. Three clues help rank them: what is mentioned first, what comes back several times in different words, and what is presented as required rather than desirable.

Note the exact vocabulary used. If the advert says "requirements gathering", that is the term to reuse, even if you call it something else day to day. This is not flattery: it is the word the recruiter and their software are looking for.

Take the five or six main requirements of the advert and look, for each one, for the evidence in your background: a project, a result, a context. Three cases come up.

• The evidence exists and is visible. Nothing to do, except check it is not at the bottom of the page.
• The evidence exists but is buried — one line among twelve, or worded differently. This is where tailoring is won: move it up and rephrase it with the words of the posting.
• The evidence does not exist. Do not invent it. If several main requirements fall into this case, the posting is probably not the right one, and that is useful to know.

Tailoring changes order, level of detail and vocabulary — never the facts. In practice: move relevant experience up, expand what serves the posting, shorten the rest without deleting it, and reuse the advert's terms where they describe what you actually did.

The CV title and the opening summary deserve particular care: they are the two things read first, and the quickest to adjust. A title echoing the target job title often makes more difference than ten rewritten lines further down.

This method works by hand. It takes about twenty minutes per posting, which becomes hard to sustain across several applications a week.

Flemmy first computes the match between your CV and the posting, with a breakdown by criterion and a list of what is missing. It then proposes a reorganised version of your CV for that role: useful experience moves up, the advert's vocabulary is reused where it fits your background, and the cover letter is written in the same pass.

You review and correct before sending. Flemmy adds no skill that is absent from your CV, and does not apply on your behalf: the application is sent from the employer's site.

Measure my match with a postingSee everything Flemmy does

• Make your CV readable by an ATS — settle this before the substance.
• Test your CV against a posting — to know where to start.
• Cover letters by occupation.
• Prepare the interview — the step after.