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Tailoring a CV in ten minutes, not an afternoon

Tailoring works. Rewriting from scratch every time is why people stop doing it.

Everyone is told to tailor their CV per application. Almost nobody sustains it, because the advice implies a rewrite, and a rewrite takes two hours.

Build a master, then swap parts

Keep one long master document with every bullet you have ever written, grouped by role. It is not a CV. It is a library. Tailoring then becomes selection rather than composition: pick the eight bullets that match this posting and drop the rest.

The four things worth changing

• The title line under your name, mirroring the posting's exact job title.
• The professional summary, three lines, front loading the role and the two skills the posting leads with.
• The order of your skills block, so the ones they named come first.
• Two or three bullets in your most recent role, reframed toward their problem.

What not to change

Dates, employers, titles and numbers stay fixed. If you find yourself adjusting those per application, you have crossed from tailoring into fiction and it will surface.

Keep a record

Save the tailored version with the company name in the filename, and keep the posting text alongside it. Three weeks later when they call, you will want to know exactly what you claimed.