How to Tailor Your CV to a Job Description (Step by Step)
Recruiters and ATS software both reward CVs that clearly match the role. Tailoring doesn't mean rewriting from scratch — it's a quick, repeatable edit. Here's the process.
Step 1: Pull the keywords
Tailoring starts with reverse-engineering the job description, so step one is to pull out its keywords before you change a single line of your CV. Read the posting closely and list the skills, tools, qualifications, and responsibilities it mentions — paying special attention to anything repeated or placed in a "requirements" or "must-have" section, since repetition signals what the employer weights most. Those exact terms are what an applicant tracking system scores your CV against, and they're also what the recruiter scans for in the first few seconds. Capture them in the posting's own wording ("stakeholder management," not your paraphrase of it), because the ATS matches literal terms, not synonyms. This short list becomes your checklist for the rest of the process: every keyword that genuinely applies to you is one you'll want to surface naturally in your summary, skills, and experience — which is exactly what the next steps walk through.
Step 2: Mirror them honestly
Update your summary, skills, and experience bullets to include those terms where they genuinely apply to you. Use the same words the posting uses ("customer success" vs "client support").
Step 3: Reorder for relevance
Put the most relevant experience and achievements first. A recruiter spends seconds on the top third of your CV — make it count for this specific role.
Step 4: Check the match
Paste the job description into write.cv's ATS scorer to see how well your tailored CV matches and what's still missing. Adjust, re-score, and export.