How to Quickly Tailor Your Resume for Specific Jobs

Thank you for reading the EdSkipper, Skip’s newsletter about skipping from education to education-aligned careers. Every Saturday, I send out a list of curated remote jobs. Premium subscribers receive two additional emails a month with industry insights and advice to help you apply more competitively to the jobs you’re passionate about.

Tailoring a resume for each job (or even for a few favorite) jobs is one of the most frustrating parts of the job search. After all, you’ve already spent a ton of time writing a core resume and now you have to decide which bullets to add or subtract for any given job description.

And that job description may sound like every other similar job role you’ve been applying to. It can feel like a lot of work to close read every job description looking for hints about what the company is looking for in a candidate. 

Educators frequently ask me in 1:1s how necessary it really is to individually tailor your resume, especially if you already have a well-targeted resume.

(I define a well-targeted resume as one where your bullet points describe high-level tasks you’ve done that are aligned with high-level tasks frequently seen in job descriptions for that role.)

In other words, if you’ve already gone through a bunch of job descriptions for the same type of role (and the same level of responsibility) and aligned the bullet points in your resume to target the common tasks they do and skills they require, isn’t your resume strong enough to get to the interview stage? 

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

It likely is sufficient: when a job description is fairly boilerplate, the company mission fairly general or typical, your job titles are similar, and/or it’s a job you’d enjoy but aren’t passionate about, etc. In these cases, a well-targeted resume is totally fine. 

It’s better to tailor your resume if you are a very strong fit for the role – especially because you have a lot of experience doing similar (but not the same) tasks or working on similar missions. In such cases, tailoring your resume can help you stand out from a pile of candidates with similar backgrounds. 

Right now, a lot of candidates are applying to jobs and they have similar experiences as you do – they’ve also done all the things that help you stand out (served as a department head, led professional development, created new curriculum, etc).

So differentiating yourself is particularly important. Tailoring your resume to the job is one of the best ways to take similar skills and show how you do them distinctly.

It’s also important to tailor your resume when the role includes skills that are not typically seen in that kind of role. Many people just hit ‘apply’ and ‘upload their resume’ to a job. Tailoring your resume in these circumstances is a great opportunity to increase the ‘odds’ of your resume being reviewed more throughly — because it actually describe how you’re particular for that specific role and not similar ones.

What’s in this issue:

• A System to Tailor Your Resume (premium subscribers only)

  • Introduction

  • A strategy to quickly tailor your resume

  • A resource to manage all your tailored bullet points

  • Three ways to make the process of tailoring your resume more efficient

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