Tailoring your resume for every job is dead. Hallelujah!
After helping clients navigate this tough market, here’s the truth: tailoring takes too much time, causes too much stress, and yields too little results.
This advice used to work! There was a time when AI was still new enough, and applications were at a volume that recruiters could handle, and it was a decent way to get an edge.
But now, everybody’s doing it, and not just on their own. AI Apply tools let candidates tailor at scale, at the same time the AI built into the ATS is getting smarter. It’s created a lot of application noise, and now recruiters are digging deeper than keyword matching, and building new strategies to find the right candidates.
Today’s recruiters:
Use knockout questions and complex boolean searches to account for synonyms and similar phrases, rendering resume tailoring unnecessary;
May rely on AI ranking features that surface the “best” candidates to the top of the list, or score candidates based on criteria beyond simple keywords;
Are using long-form answer questions before the phone screen to give candidates a chance to standout qualitatively (more on that later).
So what should you do instead?
You are going to create one resume that highlights your skills, your business impact, and the target role, and change it as little as possible for each application.
This should be a relief to those of you that have been tailoring your resume. It will give you more time to focus on the other parts of your application.
How to optimize your resume for your target role
If you haven’t yet, first check out my guide to deciding on your target role.
Find at least 3 examples of your target role.
Compare for similar keywords, requirements, skills, phrases etc.
Compare for significant differences, especially if those differences are highly prioritized
This is a great task for AI. Copy and paste the 3 job descriptions into your favorite LLM and create a prompt that asks for the highest priority skills, similar language, etc.
You don’t have to outsource your thinking or your resume writing to AI, but use it to easily find patterns and make this process go more quickly.
Rewrite your resume to speak to this new profile.
Every bullet should demonstrate the most important required skills across the different jobs
Every bullet should demonstrate your business impact
This is what I meant by “provable”-- you need to be able to say “my expertise made this impact on the business.”
How to write a great resume bullet
A simple way to write a great bullet is to use the AMMO Method: Action + Metric + Method + Outcome.
Action | Lead each bullet with a strong verb | Reduced Churn |
Metric | A quantifiable result of your actions | by 15% |
Method | The process, emphasizing what you specifically did | with proactive health monitoring |
Outcome | The business impact of your actions | resulting in revenue increase of $100k |
This all comes together like so:
Reduced Churn by 15% with proactive health monitoring, growing ARR by $100k.
I like the AMMO method because it helps you break each bullet into easy to digest parts, which makes it easy for the recruiter to skim, easy for you to discuss in an interview, and easy to emphasize your impact on the business.
What if you don’t have any numbers to use?
Hiring teams are looking for numbers on a resume, it’s as simple as that. It is always better to quantify your impact than not, but it is more important and relevant for more recent roles. Don’t wrack your brain to get metrics together for a years-old role, and focus on perfecting your last CSM role.
Do I always have to write in AMMO order?
While the acronym implies an order, you absolutely don’t need to structure your bullets that way. Action should always come first, but you can mix up the rest as needed, so it feels more natural. There may be times you eliminate an M, and that’s fine.
The point is for this to be a guide, not a prescription. It’s designed to get you thinking, and help you write in a way that breaks down your skills and achievements. Use this when you’re stuck writing a bullet, and allow yourself to make changes as you need so that it feels more like you.
The Highlights Section
In addition to Skills, Education, and Work Experience, you also want to include a Highlights section before anything else. The purpose of this section is to bring your biggest accomplishments and most important skills right to the top of the page, and hyper-focus on impact. Hiring teams want to see what you can accomplish, and this gives it to them, right up front.
An example Highlights section looks like:
5+ years experience as a Customer Success Manager in B2B SaaS, managing portfolios valued over $3m ARR and driving 95%+ renewal rates.
Proven track record of growing account spend through upsells and cross-sells, contributing over $550K+ in expansion revenue.
Highlights shouldn’t just be reiterating your best bullets: they should surface patterns across roles. Highlights are especially useful for showcasing important skills from less recent roles, or skills that might not be obvious (like language fluency), or advanced education up top without taking away from the work experience as a whole.
You can use the AMMO Method as a jumping off point, but Highlights work best when they are combining multiple achievements, summarizing patterns and progression in your career, and reveal something unique about you as a candidate.
I recommend replacing the Professional Summary entirely with the Highlights section, unless you are making a large career transition or pivot and need to explain.
When to tailor your resume
The point of creating your one, optimized resume is that you don’t have to waste time tailoring it every time. But like any good rule, there are exceptions.
Here are some examples of when I’ve recommended tailoring:
An open role at a category-specific software company – the software was not previously on the resume because it’s so niche, but we wanted to demonstrate the candidate’s expertise.
A role in a niche category – the optimized resume didn’t speak to all the skills and nuances of the category in order to stay relevant, but adding a new highlight that focused on category skills and jargon helped demonstrate expertise.
The role was functionally similar to previous roles, but had a different title – specifically, we swapped “Onboarding Lead” for “Program Manager.” The skills were the same, but the title had different implications.
The role wanted deep operational expertise – this is not always the case for CSM roles, so we rewrote the highlights and emphasized ops skills in the experience section.
If you must tailor, focus primarily on the Highlights Section. This integrates those keywords or essential pieces of information with your achievements and your business impact, and leaves your work experience alone, which has already been optimized for the majority of roles.
You should never feel you have to tailor, but if you want to, be strategic!
A note on Secondary Target Roles
Once you create an optimized resume for your Primary Target Role, you also need to create another optimized resume for your Secondary Target Role. This is what I meant about more work – you have to treat them separately – one resume will not work for multiple roles.
But, once you do this step for all of your Target roles, then the work is a lot easier.