Why you should tailor your resume for the jobs you want

Tailoring your resume doesn’t mean that you create a whole new resume for every job application. That would take an enormous amount of time and make your job search much harder than it needs to be.

Tailoring your resume means working from your existing (hopefully well-crafted, error-free) resume and highlighting different skills and experiences based on the job description. The idea is to try to match what you have to offer to what the employer needs.

For example, let’s say you’re looking for a project management role in the healthcare industry. One job description lists “managing contracts” as the first responsibility. If you have this experience, include it prominently in the document.

Another job description has “represents the department in public forums” as one of their top responsibilities. If you have experience with public speaking, you’d showcase this information.

It takes some practice to learn how to customize your resume effectively. The first few times you do it, it may take a couple of hours. It gets easier—and faster—the more you do it.

Spending the time to tailor your resume pays off in a number of different ways.

• It shows employers that you understand the needs for the role they’ve posted. This alone will make your resume stand out. Hiring managers often receive hundreds of applications per job posting, and many of those fall far short of addressing what the company hopes to find.
• Employers know that you went the extra mile to apply for their position
• It helps recruiters imagine you in the role when they see how well your skills match their needs
• Your resume is more likely to be flagged by the applicant tracking system as a strong match

Tailoring your resume isn’t complicated. It comes down to following a few simple steps.

1. Have a well-crafted resume to work from
2. Read the job description carefully. Highlight the needed skills and experience that match yours most closely.
3. Move your matching skills to the most prominent place on your resume
4. Look for keywords in the job description and incorporate them—in your own words—in your summary statement, headings, and bullet points

Don’t cut and paste text from the job description and add it to your resume. Kimberly, a Talent Acquisition Partner with Fidelity, says it’s obvious when someone has copied the job description word-for-word. “Make sure it’s in your words, and it’s in your genuine voice.”

Even though you’re tweaking your resume to align with different job postings, you want the language to sound natural.

If you don’t have professional experience already, recruiters may struggle to imagine you in that kind of role. When you know how to tailor your resume, you help them see your experience and skills as applicable to the role they’ve posted.

Kimberly says, “What you accomplished in the past role isn’t going to change, but what you highlight certainly can change.”

Let’s look at how this works for someone with retail experience hoping to move into a corporate setting. This person can emphasize different aspects of their experience when they apply for roles as varied as project management, sales, and human resources. Here’s what they could showcase on their customized resumes:

• For a project management role: Include information about being entrusted to roll out and display new product lines or organize company events.
• For a sales role: Talk about monthly personal and team sales figures, commissions earned, and sales benchmarks met.
• For human resources management: Highlight how you trained new employees, conducted interviews, and managed schedules.

Kimberly says, “You do all of those things in a retail setting. Every single person in retail has had to deal with them.” The trick when it comes to tailoring your resume is, “how you order them and highlight them.” That’s what makes the difference when a recruiter looks at your resume.

Reading job postings can make you feel pretty inadequate. Some have pages of required skills and job responsibilities. You look at them and think, “I don’t meet half of these requirements!” and then you go back to scrolling through your social media feeds.

Not so fast.

The skills and requirements listed in job postings aren’t set in stone. In some sense, they’re aspirational on the company’s part—their wildest dreams, so to speak. They don’t expect anyone to check all of the boxes.

In her role as a Fidelity Talent Acquisition Partner, Kimberly advises job seekers to take a more generous view of their qualifications. “My personal rule of thumb is, if you’re meeting 50% of the [technical skills] that are being asked for, that is good enough for me.”

That opens many more possibilities for job seekers. You don’t always have to have the degree, the technical savvy, and 7 years of experience. If you have some of the requirements, and you can highlight your relevant experience in your customized resume, you just may get the call.

Don’t waste your time sending out the same exact resume to hundreds of job postings. Strategically customize your resume to highlight all the ways your experience matches what employers need.