How to tailor a resume to a job description: a worked example

To tailor a resume to a job description, list the posting's requirements in its own words, find the evidence for each one in your history, and then change your summary, your most recent bullets and your skills so that the match is visible in the posting's vocabulary. You do not rewrite the whole document, and you never add experience you do not have.

It works for a practical reason. Recruiters search applications for exact terms, and their tools suggest those terms from the job post. Greenhouse's talent filtering, for example, starts from "suggested keywords generated from your public job post", and "the keyword from your search must exactly match the keyword in the application." If you call the same work by a different name, a search can miss you. The longer explanation is in what applicant tracking systems actually do.

The rest of this guide is one worked example, from posting to finished edits. A version for a single application takes about twenty minutes once you have done it twice.

The posting

This is an invented posting, shortened, of the kind you would find for a customer success role at a software company:

Customer Success Manager, Mid-Market

You will own a book of 40 to 60 mid-market accounts, from onboarding to renewal. You will run quarterly business reviews (QBRs), spot churn risk early, and work with Sales on expansion.

Requirements: 3+ years in customer success or account management at a B2B SaaS company. Experience with Salesforce and a customer success platform such as Gainsight. A track record of improving retention.

Nice to have: SQL. Spanish.

The resume before

Also invented. The candidate is a real fit, but nothing on the page says so in the posting's terms:

Account Manager, a B2B software company, 2022 to present

Summary: Account manager with four years of experience in SaaS. Responsible for managing client relationships and ensuring customer satisfaction.

• Responsible for a portfolio of mid-sized clients.
• Held regular review meetings with key clients.
• Worked with the sales team on upsells.
• Improved the onboarding process.

Skills: CRM, client relations, communication, Excel, data analysis.

Step 1: write down the posting's terms

Read the posting once for meaning, then again with a pen. Copy out three things, in the posting's exact words.

1. The title

   "Customer Success Manager".

2. The requirements, one per line

   Customer success, account management, B2B SaaS, 3+ years, Salesforce, Gainsight (or "customer success platform"), retention.

3. The repeated or emphasized work

   Book of accounts, onboarding, renewal, quarterly business reviews, churn, expansion.

Nice-to-haves go on a separate line: SQL, Spanish.

If a posting is vague ("strong stakeholder management"), look the role up in O*NET OnLine, the US Department of Labor's occupational database. It lists the standard titles, tasks and tools for an occupation, which is the vocabulary most postings borrow from.

Step 2: map each term to your evidence

Now put your own history next to each term. Every row lands in one of three buckets.

Posting term	Evidence from the candidate's history	Bucket
Account management, B2B SaaS, 3+ years	Four years as an account manager at a B2B software company	Same thing, already stated
Customer success	The job was customer success in all but name: onboarding, reviews, renewals	Same thing, different words
Book of 40 to 60 accounts	"Portfolio of mid-sized clients", 55 accounts	Same thing, different words
Quarterly business reviews	"Regular review meetings", held quarterly	Same thing, different words
Salesforce	Used daily; written as "CRM"	Same thing, different words
Retention, churn	Account churn fell from 14% to 9% over a year after the onboarding changes	Evidence exists, not on the page
Expansion	Worked with sales on upsells; 12 expansions in the last year	Same thing, different words
Gainsight	Never used it	Gap
SQL	Writes basic queries for account reports	Evidence exists, not on the page
Spanish	None	Gap

The middle bucket, same thing in different words, is where most of the work is. The "evidence exists, not on the page" rows are where most of the gain is. The gaps stay gaps.

Step 3: rewrite the summary

The summary is the first thing a reader sees and the place to state the match in one breath: the target title, the years, the domain, and one result.

Before:

Account manager with four years of experience in SaaS. Responsible for managing client relationships and ensuring customer satisfaction.

After:

Customer success and account manager with four years at a B2B SaaS company, managing a book of 55 mid-market accounts in Salesforce from onboarding to renewal. Cut account churn from 14% to 9% in a year by rebuilding onboarding and running quarterly business reviews.

What changed and why:

• "Customer success" now appears next to the real title. The candidate's job title stays "Account Manager" in the experience section, because that was the title. Changing a past title to match a posting is the kind of thing a reference check catches.
• "Responsible for" is gone. It describes a duty, not an outcome.
• The posting's terms appear because they are true: B2B SaaS, book, mid-market, Salesforce, onboarding, renewal, churn, quarterly business reviews.
• One number does the work of a paragraph.

Step 4: rewrite the most recent bullets

Edit the newest role first; it gets most of the attention. Each bullet should start with what you did and end with what changed.

Before:

• Responsible for a portfolio of mid-sized clients.
• Held regular review meetings with key clients.
• Worked with the sales team on upsells.
• Improved the onboarding process.

After:

• Managed a book of 55 mid-market SaaS accounts from onboarding to renewal.
• Ran quarterly business reviews (QBRs) for the top 20 accounts, using Salesforce reports to flag churn risk a quarter ahead.
• Partnered with Sales on 12 expansion deals in the past year.
• Rebuilt the 30-day onboarding plan, cutting account churn from 14% to 9% within a year.

Three details are worth copying:

• Write the long form and the abbreviation once. "Quarterly business reviews (QBRs)" matches a search for either. The same goes for tools and certifications that are commonly shortened.
• Use the posting's word for the same thing: "book" instead of "portfolio", "expansion" instead of "upsell". This is not spin; the activity is identical and the recruiter will search the posting's word.
• Spell out titles and names in full. Greenhouse's resume parsing notes list abbreviated titles ("Sr. Account Exec" instead of "Senior Account Executive") among the things that parse poorly.

The numbers in this example are invented. Yours have to be ones you can explain in an interview.

Step 5: adjust the skills list

Before: CRM, client relations, communication, Excel, data analysis.

After: Salesforce, customer onboarding, quarterly business reviews, churn analysis, renewals and expansion, SQL (basic), Excel.

"CRM" became the product the posting named. "Communication" went, because every applicant claims it and nobody searches for it. SQL is in, with an honest qualifier, because it is true and the posting asked. Gainsight and Spanish are not there.

Step 6: decide what to do about the gaps

Gainsight is a requirement-adjacent gap: the posting says "a customer success platform such as Gainsight". If you have used a comparable tool, name it. If you have not, leave it off the resume and, if you get the interview, say how you learned Salesforce reporting quickly. Spanish is a nice-to-have; leave it off.

What not to change

• Older roles: trim them, do not rewrite them. Their job is to show a consistent history.
• Dates and employers: tailoring changes emphasis, never facts.
• Layout: a single column with standard headings parses reliably; tailoring is not the moment for a new template.

Checking the result

Read the finished summary and first role next to the posting. Every requirement you meet should be findable by its exact name in under ten seconds. Then count: of the posting's terms from step 1, how many now appear in your resume? In this example, it went from three (account management, SaaS, onboarding) to all but two, and the two missing are real gaps.

Nimbae does that count as you edit. Paste the job description and it pulls out up to 40 terms, weighting known skills above ordinary words, and shows which ones your document already contains and which it does not. It shows the gap and leaves the wording to you; it will not insert terms for you. See how the ATS check works.

Sources

• Greenhouse, Talent filtering: keyword search, suggested keywords from the job post, exact matching.
• Greenhouse, Unsuccessful resume parse: abbreviated titles and other parsing problems.
• US Department of Labor, O*NET OnLine: standard occupational titles, tasks and tools.