alt Hacker NewsProbably a dumb question, but when you say "tailor your resume", what kind of tailoring do you mean? I've seen this advice repeated a lot, but I've rarely taken it because I tend to apply to jobs with the same job title and roughly the same responsibilities; in general, I assumed that tailoring is mainly helpful if you have a diverse/generalist skillset.
Like, it's obvious to me why a true Jack of all trades would use different resumes for applying to a plumber role vs a carpenter role, but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
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If the job is for a backend Java developer position, change the list of languages you know from:
Languages: JavaScript, C#, Python, Java
Languages: Java, C#, JavaScript, Python
> but less clear why a career plumber would tailor resumes for applying to two plumber roles at slightly different companies.
If one company is looking for a plumber to do PEX and another is looking for someone who is experienced with natural gas and black pipe, you might want to make sure that your experience in those two different domains of plumbing are at the front of the experience. They're both plumbers, but the heating and air conditioning company hiring a plumber is looking for different things than the residential new construction plumber.
Several months ago, having exhausted all other options in fruitless job search, I asked for assistance of a recruiter who I used to work with some time ago. Just to get some pointers on how I could improve my search, with his experience working on the other side. His advice on "tailoring" was very simple.
Go to the most popular LLM (ie Claude). Give it the job description. Give it your resume. Ask it for percentage match, it will give you a number. Then ask for advice on improving your resume, you can either ask to rework the resume by itself (if you're in a hurry) or you can work with the thing to modify the sections/entries yourself, one by one, if you have time. With each modification you will get better and better percentage match. Ideally you need to get to high 80% or maybe even 90%.
The idea is that automated ranking tools used by recruiters/HR are ultimately use the very same LLM, so you are improving your ranking assigned to your resume by those ranking systems.
I have to add that now this advice is mostly useless as everybody's using the same technique so you won't be standing up against others but merely be on the same level.
Add to it the fact that many job descriptions are inaccurate and sometimes downright misleading, and hiring managers use their own criteria, and you will understand why connections/referrals is probably the only way to get hired now.