Your Final Draft Should Never Be Your Final Draft
So now you have the final draft of your resume. That’s it. You’re done. Right?
Wrong.
Hopefully the resume we’ve just written will be a solid foundation to use to apply to every job you see. But every job is different. And every job application might require you to tweak your resume to make the best submission.
One of the biggest mistakes I see jobseekers make is when they send the same one-size-fits-all resume to each and every job they apply to. This is no good.
Employers like to see you’ve done your homework. And they have taken pains to describe exactly the sort of candidate that they want for the position. If you don’t tailor your resume to at least make an attempt to match the sort of candidate they’re looking for, then at best you won’t qualify and at worst you look like you’re not paying attention.
This doesn’t mean that you have to rewrite your resume wholesale each time you send it in to a new position. A tweak here or there might be enough.
Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you’re an architect. You have a standard architecture resume that works for 9 out of 10 firms you apply to.
But one day you decide to apply to a firm that specializes in historic preservation architecture. This is a slightly different can of worms, right?
Well, luckily for you, you’ve done some historic preservation projects in the past. You have them hidden down in your career history because normally they’re not that important.
Not that important, that is, until now! Of course it behooves you to bring that historic preservation work front and center for this application. Maybe re-write your qualifications summary to reflect your preservation skills. Perhaps rewrite the description of the job that gave you the preservation experience so that you give more emphasis to your preservation bona fides. You might even rewrite your summary paragraph to talk about how you’re such a committed historic preservation architect.
The point here is that you should always be willing to tweak your resume to reflect the job you’re applying to. There is no one-size-fits-all for resumes, but if you have a solid foundation to build from, then hopefully you’ll be tweaking from a position of strength.