Tailoring a CV comes down to four moves. Read the job description for the skills and terms it repeats, and mirror that exact terminology wherever you genuinely have the experience. Reorder your bullet points so the most relevant ones sit first, and rewrite your summary for this specific role. Never invent experience, employers, or numbers; tailoring is emphasis, not fiction.
Why mirroring their words matters
Recruiters skim, and screening software scans, for the posting’s own vocabulary. If the ad says “team leadership” and your CV says “managed a team of five”, that is the same fact in the wrong words, and it can cost you the match. This is true whether you call the document a CV or a resume; the software does not care what you call it, only how it is worded. So lift the posting’s terms where they honestly describe what you did, and keep your own phrasing everywhere else.
What if a keyword is not on your CV?
Only claim the ones you can back up. If the posting asks for a skill you genuinely have but never wrote down, add it, with a line of evidence. If you do not have it, leave it out. An invented skill or an inflated metric sails through the screening stage and then collapses in the interview, which is a far worse place to lose the job. One honest gap reads better than one exposed lie.
Reorder, do not rewrite history
The facts of your career do not change between applications; the emphasis does. Move the bullets that speak to this posting to the top of each job entry and trim the ones that do not. The summary is the most tailorable part of the whole document: two to four sentences, aimed squarely at this role, built only from what the rest of the CV already proves.
Make every bullet earn its place
A strong bullet is a strong verb plus concrete scope: what you did, at what scale, for whom. Keep the real numbers you have, and resist the urge to add ones you do not. Above all, show the trait rather than asserting it. “Results-driven” tells the reader nothing; a bullet describing an actual result does the work for you.
Example
Common mistakes
- Sending the identical CV to every posting. Generic in, generic out.
- Stuffing in keywords you cannot back up. Each one is an interview question you will fail.
- Inventing percentages to sound quantified. A made-up number is the easiest thing to catch.
- Tailoring the bullets but leaving the summary generic. It is the first thing anyone reads.