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Part of Resumes and cover letters for people who want the details
How to think about resumes and cover letters jobs
Resumes tailored to one posting answer a list somebody wrote first: where a posting comes from, the three-column reading, and the twenty-minute layer.
A resume tailored to a posting outperforms a general one, and the reason is narrow enough to be worth stating: the person reading it is checking your document against a list somebody wrote before the job was advertised. Tailoring means making that check easy. It does not mean rewriting yourself for every application.
What to take away
- The posting is a list of things the employer intends to check. Answer that list in its own words.
- Tailoring has a cost, and it is worth spending on the small number of applications you actually care about.
- One master document plus a short targeted layer beats twenty separate documents nobody can keep current.
Where a posting comes from
Before a job is advertised, someone defines what the work requires, often by asking current employees. That step, job analysis, is described in federal guidance at job analysis, plain enough for candidates to use.
From Job Analysis to Interview
- Job analysis defines the work
- Tasks and qualities listed
- Posting written from the list
- Screening criteria set
- Interview questions follow
The output matters most: a list of tasks and required qualities becomes the posting, then the screening criteria, then the interview questions.
That is why the posting's own vocabulary is worth borrowing. It is not keyword stuffing. It is answering the question that was actually asked, in the form it will be checked in.
Reading a posting into three columns
| Column | What goes in it | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Stated requirements | Anything phrased as required or essential | Address every one explicitly, or explain the nearest thing you have |
| Preferences | Anything phrased as desirable | Address the ones you have, ignore the rest |
| Description of the work | The paragraphs about what the role does | Mine this for the vocabulary and for the real job |
The third column is where most of the value is and where most candidates spend the least time. The requirement list is written by whoever owns the process; the description of the work is often written by the person who will manage you, and it tells you what they care about.
Three Columns of a Posting
Stated requirements
- How it is phrased
- Required, essential
- What to do
- Address every one
- Who writes it
- Process owner
- Value to you
- Must cover
Preferences
- How it is phrased
- Desirable
- What to do
- Address the ones you have
- Who writes it
- Process owner
- Value to you
- Optional
Description of the work
- How it is phrased
- Paragraphs about the role
- What to do
- Mine for vocabulary
- Who writes it
- Your future manager
- Value to you
- Highest value
The targeted layer
Keep one long master document containing everything you have done, with scope stated properly, and build each application from it. The targeted layer is small.
The Twenty-Minute Targeted Layer
- Summary line naming role and scope
- Reorder so relevant work is above the fold
- Rewrite two or three lines in posting vocabulary
- Remove anything that costs reader attention
- Keep every claim true and evidencable
That is usually twenty minutes of work. It is worth doing for the applications you care about and not worth doing for a speculative round of forty, which is a decision about where to spend your time rather than a rule.
The one non-negotiable is that the substance stays true. Rewriting "coordinated suppliers" as "managed vendor relationships" is translation. Rewriting it as "led procurement" when you approved nothing is a claim that will fail at the reference stage.
Where the requirements are unusually explicit
Public sector applications are stricter about what a resume must contain, and reading those rules improves a private-sector document too. The US federal guidance on what to include in a resume asks for dates, hours, and a specific description of duties, not a polished summary.
That discipline, stating what you did precisely enough to be verified, is exactly what makes a commercial resume credible.
The same body's material on competencies is the other half of it: the qualities employers actually assess, named and defined. Matching your evidence to a defined quality is more persuasive than asserting the quality.
The cover letter's one job in an application
For a specific posting, the letter exists to explain something the resume cannot: why this employer, why now, and how to read the one part of your history that looks odd. A gap, a change of field, a short stint, a move backward in title. Say it in a sentence, without apology, and move on.
If nothing about your history needs explaining and you have nothing specific to say about the employer, the letter does no work. Put the effort into the resume instead.
General craft for both documents is in the resumes and cover letters guide. How they fit the rhythm of a search is in the job search guide.
Before you send
Check that every stated requirement is addressed and the relevant material appears in the first third of the page.
Confirm no claim exceeds what you could evidence in an interview, and name the file so a stranger can find it a month later. Then send it quickly, because the early batch is small.
If the role is a supervisory one, expect the scope language to carry more weight than the task list, for the reasons set out in the management jobs page. If it is a role where the work is measured in throughput, the operations guide explains what the reader is likely to be looking for instead.
Common questions
Does an applicant tracking system read my resume?
Usually something parses it into fields, and a person reads what comes out. The practical implication is to keep the structure ordinary: real headings, dates in a normal format, no text inside images or tables that a parser will scramble.
Should I address a cover letter to a named person?
If you can find one honestly, yes. Guessing wrong is worse than a neutral greeting.
How different should two applications be?
The substance identical, the emphasis different. If two applications require genuinely different substance, you are applying for two different jobs and should have two master documents.
Is a one-page resume still expected?
It depends on the field and on how much you have done. The real rule is that everything on the page earns its space. A second page of scope beats a first page of adjectives.
What if I do not meet one stated requirement?
Apply, and address it. Requirement lists are aspirational more often than not, and a candidate who names the gap and says what they have instead reads as confident rather than unqualified.
