The generic resume kept winning

I used to tell people to tailor their resume to every job they applied for. Then a man I spoke with about his job search showed me a test he'd been running on himself.

He kept two versions. One he rewrote for each posting, line by line, the way everyone says you should. The other was generic: broad, a little clumsy, and packed with the words his field uses. He sent both out for a while, and the generic one kept getting through the screening software while the careful one stalled.

Once he walked me through it, it made sense. The software wasn't judging fit. It was matching words, and his tailored version had traded some of them away for better sentences. All that care only paid off when a person already had his name, because someone had passed it along.

That was before most people had AI write their resumes, and before some companies put AI in the first screen too. I haven't seen anyone rerun his test since, so I wouldn't promise it comes out the same way now. What has changed is that the careful version is cheap now, so it no longer sets you apart before a person is reading.

So I'd flip the order. Before you put real work into tailoring a resume, find the person who'll read it, or someone who can pass your name to them. Then tailor that one. Until someone has your name, the resume is mostly paperwork.

Photo made with AI.