How to Tailor Your CV to a Job Description

Most people either send one generic CV to every job, or spend an hour rewriting it from scratch each time. Both are wrong. Tailoring is smaller and more mechanical than it sounds: it's about matching the language of the job description, not rewriting your career.

Start with the job description itself. Read it twice and underline the recurring nouns — the tools, the responsibilities, the seniority signals. Job descriptions repeat what they actually care about, whether or not it's the most important skill on paper.

Then look at your CV's summary and top bullet points. These are what get read first, by a human or a keyword scanner. If the words you underlined don't appear anywhere near the top of your CV, that's the gap to close — using experience you genuinely have, described in the job description's terms.

Don't touch your job titles, dates, or employers. Tailoring is about emphasis and language, not fabrication. If a job description asks for something you've never done, the honest move is to not claim it, not to quietly slip it in.

Finally, re-check length and structure. A tailored CV should still be scannable in ten seconds: clear section headers, consistent bullet formatting, no walls of text. Tailoring the words and ignoring the shape defeats the purpose.