Katie Roberts Career Consulting

If you feel like you’re sending off rafts of applications with little success, it might be time to change your approach. Tailoring your application is an important stage in the job search process for many reasons – but it becomes more so in a competitive job market like the one we’re experiencing at the moment. It may mean the difference between your Resume ending up in the YES or NO pile so what are you waiting for?

We often tell our clients that job applications are like sales proposals and any good sales person knows they need to be tailored to achieve success. While we usually recommend writing a customised cover letter for each role you are applying for, tailoring the entire application is often something candidates relegate to the ‘too hard’ basket. The process of tailoring your Resume can sound time consuming, but we challenge you to put yourself in the recruiter’s shoes and ask yourself ‘What’s in it for me?’ Your job application should immediately highlight you as someone who can add value in the role.

Before we even begin to tailor, we are assuming that you have a killer resume in place already – a document that highlights who you are, identifies your key skills, and shows the value you have added in previous roles. If you don’t already have that, then focus on this step first – see our previous article How to Write a Resume – Top 10 Tips to get started. Then, follow these five simple steps to tailor it each time you apply:

1.    Do Your Research: The first step is research. Read the job ad and identify exactly what they are looking for. Highlight skills or experience that seem important and make notes. If the company is advertising directly, have a look at their website, Google the company name and find out if any current company or industry events might impact the job. Writing just one sentence that references your knowledge of a current situation could mean the difference between success and failure at this initial stage.

2.    Customise Your Career Profile: We always recommend including a good strong career profile in your Resume. The profile should introduce you and highlight what you will bring to the role. It should clearly demonstrate your skills and past experience and highlight how they add value to an organisation. Most people see this section as fairly standard; however by customising the content to address specific individual job requirements, you’ll put yourself a step ahead. Make it enthusiastic, passionate, easy to understand, concise and engaging – and clearly demonstrate to the recruiter ‘What’s in it for me?’ in the context of the job you’re applying for.

3.    Change Your Key Skills: Once you know the recruiter’s main priorities in terms of what they’re looking for, you can customise your content to meet those needs. In its simplest form, this means re-ordering your ‘key skills’. Get more involved by rewording those key skills and customising them to suit the job. Think about what the job is asking for and how you can demonstrate that skill by some past experience or success.

4.    Write a Customised Cover Letter: We can’t stress enough how important this step is. Writing a customised cover letter is the simplest way for your application to stand out from others. Think about it for a second – if a recruiter receives 100 or so applications, how do you think they’re going to choose which ones to actually read in detail? Research has proven that you literally have seconds to make a good first impression. Preparing a cover letter that highlights your key skills, experiences and past achievements that are highly relevant to the role you are applying for increases your chances significantly of ‘getting noticed’.

5.    Change the Order of Your Job History: This is not something we recommend doing unless absolutely necessary because the Resume can become confusing. However, where we may recommend doing this is if you have highly relevant experience in your past work history, with the recent roles not at all relevant. In this case, you should make a new section called “Relevant Employment History” then list the relevant roles. Move your other more recent role descriptions to a section called “Other Employment History”. This means that the recruiter will see your ‘relevant experience’ first but the title of the section will give some insight into why that experience is not recent.

Taking the time to tailor your application might seem time consuming, but if it means the difference between success and failure, it’s worth it! We talk to so many candidates who are seemingly perfect for roles, but aren’t achieving interviews. After tweaking their applications, they are amazed at the success they can achieve.

Are you struggling to achieve interviews? Do you feel your application lacks relevance to the roles you are applying for? If you would like assistance from a professional Resume Writer to help you customise your job application, please see our Resume Writing and Job Search Coaching services.