Resume Tailoring

Resume tailoring

Build a version of the resume aimed at one posting. Start from the master resume every time and cut toward the role, rather than writing fresh and hoping the good material survives.

Read the posting first

Pull the top keywords out of the job description before touching the resume. Use each one once or twice in the final document. That is the whole budget.

Then check the language you already have against the language the posting uses. Where they mean the same thing, take theirs. "Directed" becomes governed, led, managed, or spearheaded depending on which word the posting itself reaches for. The point is not to flatter the ATS, it is that a hiring manager skimming for their own vocabulary finds it.

Two limits on that:

No exact phrase of three or more words appears more than twice in one resume. Repeat a long phrase a third time and the document starts to read as written for a parser instead of a person.

No keyword stuffing. If a term does not describe work you actually did, leave it out. A resume that clears the filter and then collapses in the screening call is worse than one that never cleared it.

Structure

Two pages maximum. This is a hard cap, not a target.

• Summary opens with a thesis about level, not a recap of history. Audience scale, channels owned, crisis readiness, executive exposure. The reader should place your seniority in the first four or five lines.
• Bullets lead with outcomes and carry metrics where they exist. Growth percentages, reach, campaign results. Responsibilities described without results read as a job description rather than a record.
• Core skills in a single column. Two columns parse unpredictably and save less room than they appear to.
• Tools and Education stay separate sections, never merged.
• Dates on the title row, formatted Title | Mon YYYY - Mon YYYY, not on the company row. Cleaner for ATS parsing and easier for a human to scan.
• One degree per line, degree and school spelled out in full.
• Labels are bold wherever they appear, including labels that share a line with other content.
• No employment gaps. Keep the older short roles that bridge them.

Formatting floors

Never set type smaller than 10pt. When a resume runs long, trim bullets. Do not shrink the font, and do not narrow the margins past what is already tight. Cutting a weak bullet costs nothing; unreadable type costs the interview.

Bold the numbers in results so a skimming eye catches them.

At most one em dash in the entire document, and zero is better. Commas, colons, and parentheses do the same work without the tell.

Make the contact line real hyperlinks (phone, email, site, LinkedIn), underlined in the same color as the surrounding text rather than default link blue.

The rhythm pass

Do this on every build, not only when something feels off.

A resume can be entirely true, well formatted, and still read as machine-written, because the thing that gives it away is structure rather than vocabulary. One real example: a finished draft scored 75% AI-generated by a detector. Nothing in it was invented. Every bullet ran the identical pattern, verb plus participial phrase plus participial phrase plus metric. Three-item lists throughout. Every sentence about the same length.

The fix:

• Break the uniform bullet shape. Mix one-clause bullets with two-sentence bullets. Let a metric have its own short sentence. "Instagram grew 7% in three months."
• Cut participial tails that interpret instead of report. "...protecting craft and visual cohesion across every brand surface" is filler wearing a suit. "Craft is the part I won't compromise on" says something.
• Break the rule of three. Two items, or four. Not three in every bullet.
• Use first person sparingly. Three or four instances across the page is a strong human signal. In every bullet it becomes its own pattern.
• Give the summary one short punchy sentence against the longer ones. "Reach is the easy part."

Facts never change in this pass. Numbers, dates, titles, keywords all stay exactly as they were. You are changing rhythm, not content.

A word on the detectors themselves: they are unreliable on resumes, because dense metrics and parallel structure look machine-written even when a person wrote every word. Treat a score as a prompt to look, not as a verdict. The patterns above are worth removing regardless of what any tool says about them.

Phrases to avoid outright

Known AI resume language, and transparently so to anyone who reads resumes for a living:

• "at the intersection of"
• "demonstrating"
• "orchestrated"
• "helmed"

Before delivering

1. Page count verified by rendering, not estimated.
2. No type under 10pt anywhere.
3. Em dashes: zero or one.
4. No three-plus-word phrase used more than twice.
5. Every keyword claim maps to something you can talk about for two minutes.
6. Read five consecutive bullets aloud. If they have the same shape, go back to the rhythm pass.