Product marketers invest a lot of time and effort in researching the needs and desires of their target audience. Their goal being to learn the most effective ways to make their product appealing to said audience and convert them into buyers. They also segment their audience into groups and create targeted & tailored advertisements that will better connect to their specific needs and sensibilities. In the case of the job hunt, you as the job seeker pull double duty playing the role of both the product and marketer. In an ideal job search, you have done the work to identify your target audience (companies), conducted thorough research (online + informational interviews), and you are now ready to create tailored ads (your resume) to get them to buy what you’re selling -- right? The challenge with this last step is the tedium that comes with tailoring your resume for every application. Too many job seekers skip this step or do it minimally -- to their own detriment. So...how can it be done, and done less painfully?
Practical Guide to Tailoring Your Resume
Create a modular “master” resume
Modular (adjective) - constructed with standardized units or dimensions for flexibility and variety in use.
When I create new resumes for clients, I have intentionally developed a modular style to writing the main body of the resume -- the experience section -- that makes future tailoring easier. I employ two main units (flexible parts) to accomplish this goal:
Sub-headings
Headline bullet points + Sub-bullet points
Sub-headings are used to not only provide context for what the reader is about to encounter, but also to organize related achievements under the banner of a particular skill set or knowledge domain. For example with a recent client in IT consulting, I created subheadings such as:
Data Quality and Reconciliation
Business Process Automation
Project Management
These subheadings not only provide a roadmap for your readers but also enable you to redraw this roadmap as needed. By simply changing the order of the sub-headings and their associated bullet points, you can adjust your narrative to offer critical information earlier. Based on your industry, function, and of course, the job description, you can organize key pieces of your experience within each of your roles in a way that makes it easy for both the ATS (Applicant Tracking System) and your human readers to find it.
Headline bullet points and sub-bullet points are used to provide multilayered information about your achievements in a way that can be amplified or dialed back based on the needs of the job posting you are applying to. Here is an example of what this looks like from a client in the mental health field:
Clinical Program Management
Implemented new, evidence-based (TF-CBT) treatment program, Healthy Spaces (HS), from the ground up to serve clients in Morris County.
Hired and trained staff – established all program guidelines, procedures, and created program plan goals to ensure continuous quality improvement (CQI).
Created all current program administrative documents including program manual, screening/referral forms, program statistics, and biopsychosocial assessment.
Achieved TF-CBT certification.
Below the sub-heading, the first, bolded bullet point is the “headline” that conveys the main overarching achievement. Organized underneath it are a set of related achievements and process information that expand on the headline. When tailoring for future applications you can easily delete any sub-bullet that doesn’t apply to the role at hand. It’s also possible to leave only the headline bullet if space is a concern or you need to place more emphasis on other parts of your experience.
By combining these two techniques, you give yourself the necessary flexibility to easily tailor your resume on both structural and narrative levels. Going a step further, tailoring is not complete without a close reading of the job description.
Read Job Postings Closely and Use These 3 Levels of Customization
I’m a big advocate of networking into jobs versus applying online. However, whether you choose to apply online or not, it’s critical to leverage job descriptions to help you accurately tailor your resume. I often advise clients to search and print out (yes, print) 3-5 job postings of roles they would actually wish to apply for. Next, I tell them to take two highlighters of different colors and go through all the postings. In color A, highlight all the keywords (responsibilities, skills, domain knowledge) that are common across all the postings, and in color B, the keywords that are unique to each posting.
By identifying the common keywords across 3 or more job postings, you will be able to establish the “core keywords” that most employers are looking for and use them to form the base of your resume. By weaving these “must-have” keywords into your resume from the start, in future, you will only need to identify the keywords that are unique to a specific job description. You can then implement these 3 practical steps below to further tailor your resume.
1. Keywords: The keywords highlighted in color B would be where you would focus your attention to incorporate into your resume. Only add a keyword if it is something that you authentically possess in your toolkit. These keywords might be added to your skills section or woven into the bullet points in your experience section.
2. Order of Bullet Points: It’s not an exact science, but to a degree, job descriptions tend to display information in order of importance or emphasize through repetition. Try to take cues and read into what the job posting is indicating as most important and re-order your bullet points as needed to elevate accomplishments accordingly. It’s not guaranteed that a reader will read every bullet point, so you want to be sure to have key information in the first 1-3 bullets.
3. Adding or removing content: When working from a master, modular resume, like carving a marble statue, you can simply chip away anything that is not relevant to the final product. In some cases, there may be an achievement, special project, or bit of process information or technical detail that might need to be added in order to satisfy the demands of a posting. Your aim is to provide only the most salient information to help your reader determine your value.
At the end of the day, what causes most job seekers the biggest amount of pain in the resume tailoring process is the sheer number of jobs they are applying to. This is why I encourage quality over quantity in your job search process. Narrow down your focus to 1-2 roles. Create a list of attractive companies. Tailoring your resume for a finite set of targets following the steps outlined above.
Now...how does that feel?
If you would like to discuss how to create an easy to tailor master resume, I’d love to support you! BOOK NOW for a free resume consultation.
niiato@avenircareers.com | Call/text 917-740-3048