By J.M. Auron ACRW. Expert IT Resume Writer—Providing Professional IT Resume Writing Services for More than 15 Years.
Some advice is repeatedly, loudly, continuously, and endlessly on the internet.
Within my profession—I've been providing professional IT resume writing services for more than 15 years—one of the worst, loudest, and most destructive pieces of advice is the relentless drumbeat that, "You have to tailor your resume to every job!"
First, the good news.
You really don't have to tailor your resume to every job
I hear the gasps of astonishment! The angry rebuttals from the "experts." So let me tell you why I believe this so strongly. I'll then propose a better, more effective, and much less time-consuming alternative.
The rationalizations that support tailoring your resume
Why do I call these rationalizations? Because the advice has been around for years—but the reasons keep changing. That says to me that reasons, the rationalizations, are invented after the fact to justify bad advice that people won't give up.
1) You Need to Tailor Your Resume to Pass the ATS!
This is the one you'll hear most—these days. "You have to tailor your resume to get past the ATS!" But it's not. The advice to tailor your resume dates back long before there were ATS systems—so that can't be the reason.
I've written previously on why the ATS isn't the boogie-man it's made out to be.
But beyond that, this advice makes very little sense.
First, there's no way to know definitely what is or is not a keyword. They're not marked with convenient <keyword> tags, after all. It's a guessing game. Something may, in fact, be a critical keyword. That same word may be something HR threw in without really thinking about it—trust me, job reqs are not always written carefully or well.
So there's really no way to tailor your resume to every job req—because there's no way to know (beyond the obvious) what's really important in the job req.
2) You need to tailor your resume to prove to HR that you're interested!
This rationalization goes back before the ATS; I've been hearing this one for a long time.
Unfortunately, though, creating a keyword-stuffed resume that mimics everything on the job description really doesn't prove interest. HR is going to get that you tailor your resume in exactly the same way for every other job you're applying too.
3) You need to tailor your resume to show effort
This is similar to #2, but makes even less sense.
I was a headhunter. I can tell you, with absolute sincerity, that my first thought on seeing a resume was never, not even once, "Wow! This candidate put a lot of effort into customizing the resume! This candidate much really be interested in the position! I'll give the candidate a call!"
Why? Because the candidate's interest level is absolutely and completely irrelevant. My only interest as a headhunter was, "Can this candidate do the job? Solve the problem I'm trying to solve?"
3) You need to tailor your resume to stand out!
This, again, doesn't make any sense. Let's say there are 1000 people applying for a job—by no means unreasonable these days. 900 of those people, having heard that you have to tailor your resume, use ChatGPT to do that.
ChatGPT spews out 900 nearly identical resumes. None stand out. None say anything about the candidate. There's no way for HR or the recruiter to get any sense of who the candidate is or what the candidate actually does—because every one of these resumes looks basically alike and says all the same things.
Even for the few people not using AI tools to customize the resume, the results are going to be the same. The more "customized" every resume is, the more it's written to just copy the job description, the more every one of those resumes is going to look alike.
Which completely defeats the purpose, eh?
Where did the advice to customize your resume come from
I believe that this dates back to the long ago times when people hand-typed each resume, wrote a cover letter, and mailed them to a job.
Many reading this can't remember those ancient, by gone days, but they were there.
The advice to tailor your resume makes sense in that context, though. If you're hand typing every resume, then of course you'd customize it. If you're applying for jobs against 10 other candidates (not uncommon in ancient times), showing interest by reading the job description would be picked up on by HR. And job descriptions were better written—so reading the job description carefully and writing to it made a lot more sense than in these high volume times.
It is true that a generic resume won't work
One reason the "tailor your resume" myth has gotten such wide currency is that the flip side is true. A generic resume—a resume that says nothing very specific about the candidate, skills, or match with the position certainly won't work. But this is a false dichotomy—these aren't the only two alternatives.
The better choice—a targeted resume
The better choice is neither an overly tailored resume—that looks like every other overly tailored resume—nor a generic resume that says very little about who you really are.
The better choice is a well-written, focused, targeted resume that clearly addresses the broad requirements for the jobs you're searching for.
As a professional IT resume writer, I've certainly found this to be true. Whether one of my clients is a DevOps engineer, an IT manager, or a CTO, all the jobs that client is looking for are going to look fairly similar—perhaps as much as 70%-90%. So if you write a targeted resume focused on your overarching goal, rather than to each specific job, you'll certainly hit a high enough match to get past the dreaded ATS system—with a resume that will work well for the human hiring managers.
You won't have to spend hours to tailor your resume to every job—and you won't risk sending in a ChatGPT special—a customized resume that looking exactly like every other customized resume the hiring authority sees.
That’s why I focus on writing targeted resumes in my professional IT resume writing services—and have done so for a decade and a half.
If this makes sense—or if this doesn't make sense—I'm always happy to discuss my ideas and the reasons for them.
And if you'd like to learn more about how I work? Feel free to contact me.