Align your experience to the job post
Aligning your resume to a job post actually eases and simplifies the often delayed interview revision process. We’re told to update our resume every six-to-twelve months. This is helpful to keep professional milestones and accomplishments top of mind and easiest to document. However, unless you’re applying for jobs within the same industry, doing the same type of role, at the same level of experience, it’s unlikely updating your resume every so often keeps it application-ready.
More important than how often to update a resume, we’re encouraged to tailor our resume to a job description before applying to the job. It’s wise to spend a bit of time reviewing your resume before submitting it, regardless of when it was last updated.
What seems like a nagging task can be broken down simply, here’s how to align your experience to a job post
1. Identify common roles and responsibilities (themes) mentioned throughout a job description. Themes reveal themselves. Read the paragraph description of the role and the subsequent bullets to see which keywords repeat most. It’s helpful to list themes in a row and list specific responsibilities/requirements related to the theme in a column.
Examples: subject matter expert, collaboration, communication, research, analyze large sets of data, provide recommendations …
2. Take inventory of your resume and identify which experience aligns to the themes you listed. If there are experiences on your resume which do not align to the job description, consider if it’s relevant to the role in any other way or of enough interest to keep. If not, remove (but see part four below first!). Then, list bullet points from your own resume in a second column, next to the theme they match in the job description.
3. Draft results-oriented experiences to align to themes within the job description, particularly where you do not currently demonstrate experience. These roles and responsibilities should be easy to see, they’re the blank spaces in the second column. It’s ok if gaps between the job description and your resume remain. You’re not expected to meet 100% of experience in the desired role and responsibilities.
4. Re-organize your resume to include the newly drafted experience and remove experience irrelevant to the role. If there is experience that seems irrelevant, but is a project or accomplishment you’re proud of or demonstrates a passion of yours, by all means keep this content!
If you’re applying to multiple, similar jobs at a time, the process is nearly identical and allows you to combine your efforts by creating a single resume that can be used for different applications:
Identify common roles and responsibilities (themes) between each of the similar roles. List these as detailed above.
Take inventory of your resume, just like above, and list key areas of experience which aligns to your first column, while identifying experience your resume lacks.
Draft results-oriented experience to fill any gaps, as you’re truthfully able to.
Reorganize your resume to include the newly drafted experience, revisions, and deletions.
Consider which job descriptions have additional unique experiences that should be included in your resume prior to applying. It’s worthwhile to include a few extra bullet points to tailor your resume to a specific role you’re excited about, even when tailoring your resume in bulk.
Be gentle with yourself, resume writing is a lot of work. We spend hours writing and revising our writing, hoping to make it perfectly appealing to the appropriate audience of recruiters and hiring managers. Just because parts of your resume don’t fit a particular job description well doesn’t mean they are irrelevant to other roles. Rather than delete experience because it’s irrelevant, whenever you’re working on a new resume, create a new document for each new resume you have. After applying to a few roles, you’ll have a library of drafted experience to pull from, simplifying your efforts. You’ve got this!
A few additional things to be mindful of:
Your resume is not a job description. Make sure you’re not just copying the requirements for a role. Your work experience should actually demonstrate how you’ve done the work and results you’ve achieved.
There are recruiters who care about you as a human, include volunteer work, fun projects, and professional moments you’re proud of.
Referrals matter. If there is an employee who can submit your resume as a referral, always opt to ask them instead of directly applying. It’s unfortunate, but it’s true, a lot of job applications go unread by recruiters. However, many companies ask recruiters to prioritize reviewing referred applications as a sign of appreciation for their employee taking time to refer a friend (or acquaintance).