Applications
Tailor your CV without inventing experience
Tailor your CV to a job advert with relevant examples, accurate contributions and a final check of the document you submit.
Tailor your CV by choosing evidence relevant to the job, explaining your contribution clearly and checking every fact. Change the emphasis and wording, while keeping dates, credentials, responsibilities and results accurate.
Build a record of your real experience
Tailoring a CV starts with selecting experience that relates to the vacancy. Read the advert, identify the requirements and choose examples from your work that address them. Adjust the order and explanation so the reader can find those examples. Keep the facts of your employment history intact.
Before editing, keep a working record of your experience. For each project, note what you did, who else contributed and what happened. Include details left out of your last CV, such as a handover checklist you created or a delivery problem you helped resolve. You can select from this record for each application.
The National Careers Service recommends highlighting existing skills that relate to the job advert. Check which requirements are essential and which are desirable. Include supporting experience where you have it, and record any requirement you need to ask the employer about.
Match job requirements to your experience
Create a working note with three headings: requirement, evidence and question. Under evidence, record an action you took and its context. Under question, note anything you need to clarify before applying, such as whether a qualification is mandatory. Use the evidence column to decide what to include in your CV.
Choose evidence for the role
Choose three or four important requirements and put one example beside each. For stakeholder communication, describe a time you explained a decision or gathered requirements. For analysis, state the question you investigated and what happened afterwards. Leave the evidence column empty when you have no suitable example.
Consider a fictional candidate who maintained customer-service records and helped colleagues identify recurring delivery issues. An operations CV could explain how they organised the records and reported patterns. A customer-support CV could describe how they recorded complaints and followed up with customers. Both versions draw on the same work, with emphasis suited to the role.
Be precise about your contribution
Describe your level of responsibility. If you contributed to a project, name the part you completed and who led the work. If you used a report, explain the decisions it helped you make. State which tasks you performed with a tool so the reader can assess your experience with it.
Write the contribution, then the result
Yale's career guidance suggests connecting an action with the project or problem and its result. State what you did and what it produced. Use numbers supported by your records. If you have no measured result, describe the deliverable or an observable change, such as a checklist the team adopted.
A fictional example could read: 'Created a handover checklist for new support-team members, covering account access and the escalation contacts they needed during their first week.' The sentence identifies a document, its users and its purpose. Use an example like this only when it matches work you performed.
Use the advert’s language accurately
Use terms from the advert when they describe your work accurately. Spell out an unfamiliar abbreviation on first use. Put a relevant term beside the example that supports it, and check that you could explain that example in an interview. Remove keywords that have no connection to your experience.
Review an assisted draft as your own work
An AI-assisted rewrite can change your level of responsibility or add unsupported results. Harvard's guidance encourages applicants to start from real experience and review the output for accuracy. Compare each suggestion with your working record and correct anything that overstates your contribution. Check drafts from friends and templates in the same way.
Check facts, then relevance
Read your final CV twice. First check employers, titles, dates, qualifications and contributions. Then check that the opening addresses the role and the relevant examples are easy to find. Remove repeated or unrelated details that obscure them. Save the job description and submitted CV together for interview preparation.
In VitAI, you can use your saved professional background to prepare documents for a role and keep them with the application record. Review the details suggested during tailoring before you submit. Check that the wording describes your contribution and that every result has support in your records.
