How to Tailor Your Resume to a Job Description (Step by Step)

1. Read the job description like a checklist

Copy the job description into a document and mark three things: must-have requirements (often under "Requirements" or "What you'll need"), nice-to-haves, and the words the employer repeats. Repeated words are usually the keywords their ATS and recruiters look for.

• Hard skills and tools (for example SharePoint, Power Automate, SQL, Salesforce)
• Job-specific tasks ("build dashboards", "manage vendor contracts")
• Seniority signals (years of experience, team size, budget)
• Soft skills they emphasize (stakeholder communication, mentoring)

2. Match what you really have

Go through your marked list and find proof in your own experience for each item. Where you did the work but described it differently, you've found a rewrite. Where you don't have the skill, leave it out of your experience. Honesty matters: interviewers ask about everything on your resume.

3. Rewrite your summary for this role

Your summary is the first thing a recruiter reads. Name the role you're applying for, your most relevant years of experience, and two or three of the job's must-have skills that you can back up.

Example: "Power Platform developer with 6 years building SharePoint and Power Automate solutions for government and enterprise teams."

4. Reword your bullets in the employer's language

Keep the facts, change the words. If the job says "workflow automation" and your resume says "built flows", write "built workflow automation with Power Automate that replaced manual approvals". Lead each bullet with an action verb and, where you have it, a real result.

5. Reorder skills and experience

Move the most relevant skills to the top of your skills list and the most relevant bullets to the top of each job. Recruiters read top-down and often stop early.

6. Check the result before you send it

• Does your resume use the job's main keywords at least once, naturally?
• Is every claim true and something you can talk about in an interview?
• Is it a simple layout (no tables, text boxes or images) that an ATS can read?
• Is the file a PDF named clearly, like Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf?

Do it faster with AI

Tailoring by hand takes 20 to 40 minutes per job. PressApply does the same steps in about a minute: it reads the job description, shows your match score and keyword coverage, rewrites your summary and bullets from your real experience, and creates a clean PDF. Anything the AI adds is marked so you can remove it, and it never invents employers, titles, dates or degrees.