Resume Tailoring Coach

Tailor a resume to one specific job posting. A resume is not a biography; it is an argument that this person fits that role, and the posting is the marking rubric. The work is mapping requirements to the candidate's strongest true evidence, rewriting the bullets that carry the argument, and cutting everything that does not sell — while never inventing a single fact, because every line must survive interview follow-up.

When to use this skill

• A candidate has a target posting and a general-purpose resume that is not converting
• Someone is applying across two different role types and needs distinct versions
• A career changer must reframe adjacent experience for a new field honestly
• Screeners or automated filters keep rejecting a resume the candidate believes is strong
• The user asks to "punch up" bullets, and what they actually need is targeting

Workflow

1. Deconstruct the posting first. Extract must-have requirements, nice-to-haves, repeated words, and the exact nouns and verbs the employer uses. Repetition is signal: a phrase used three times in a posting is a scoring criterion.
2. Build the evidence map before editing anything — a table of requirement, strongest true proof from the candidate's history, and where that proof currently sits in the resume. Mark genuine gaps as gaps; adjacent evidence gets framed honestly, never inflated into a claim.
3. Rewrite the top third first: the headline and a two-to-three-line summary that names the target role in the employer's language and leads with the two strongest proofs. Screeners decide in the top third; it cannot be a warm-up.
4. Rewrite bullets on the formula: strong verb, what was done, scale or context, outcome with a number where one truthfully exists. One line per bullet, and the part that matches the posting goes first.
5. Reorder before wordsmithing. The most relevant role gets the most bullets; stale or irrelevant roles compress to one line each. Relevance earns space; chronology just orders it.
6. Align vocabulary with the posting wherever it is truthful — their "customer success" over your "client happiness" — because both automated filters and skimming humans match words, not synonyms.
7. Apply the cut list: objective statements, "references available", skills last used a decade ago, duties with no outcome, and any bullet that would sell equally well for a different job. If it does not advance this application, it is taking space from something that would.
8. Run the fifteen-second test: a stranger skims the result and must be able to say what role this person is for and give three reasons they fit. If they cannot, return to step 3.

Worked example: bullet rewrite

Before: Responsible for managing the company's social media accounts
        and creating content on a regular basis.

After:  Grew organic social engagement 40% in six months by moving to
        a data-led posting calendar across three channels.

The rewrite leads with an outcome, quantifies it, and names the method — three interview questions it can happily answer.

Output format

Return, in order: the evidence map table, the rewritten resume in clean markdown, and a short change log explaining the five highest-impact edits so the candidate learns the method, not just the result.

Handling common situations

• Career gap: account for it in one confident line where the format demands it; never stretch dates to hide it
• Career change: lead with transferable outcomes and name the overlap explicitly in the summary — do not make the screener do the mapping
• No numbers available: use honest scale markers — team size, cadence, scope — rather than inventing percentages
• Overqualified: trim seniority signals that read as flight risk, but never downgrade a real title
• Early career: projects, coursework, and volunteering count as evidence when framed by outcome

Red flags that sink resumes

• A skills wall of twenty unranked technologies, half untouched for years
• Identical bullets sent to every posting — the absence of targeting is visible
• Buzzword self-praise with no evidence attached: results-driven, detail-oriented
• Employer-internal acronyms no outside screener can score
• Design flourishes that break parsing: multi-column layouts, text baked into graphics, headshots

Quality bar

• Zero fabricated or inflated claims: every number, title, and date is the candidate's own, and each bullet can survive two rounds of interview follow-up
• The posting's top three requirements are each answered within the top third of page one
• Every bullet starts with a verb, fits on one line, and contains no first-person pronouns
• Tense is consistent: past roles in past tense, the current role in present
• Length is earned: one page for early career, two pages only when a decade of relevant evidence demands it
• No typos, no orphaned lines, no dense ten-line paragraphs pretending to be bullets