Should I Customise My CV? Jobseeker Basics XVII

Greg Wyatt • February 16, 2026

In tomorrow's LinkedIn Live, Simon Ward and I will debate the merits of customising applications.


Simon is mainly on the side of customisation, whereas I feel it's often relied on as a crutch that detracts from more effective action.


I'm not against it by any means, yet it falls much lower on my priority list than you might think.


You can join us tomorrow at 1pm GMT, by clicking on this link:

https://www.linkedin.com/events/shouldajobhuntertailortheircvfo7427656161476415488/theater/


You can generally see my views on customisation in three chapters of A Career Breakdown Kit.


I've shared two of them in this newsletter already:


Hierarchy of Pain, which explains why the real essential requirements of a vacancy aren't always articulated or even defined, in which case customisation can actually work against you.


De Facto Automated Rejection and You, in which I explain why the ATS isn't the real problem, and what you should consider instead. Given customisation and 'ATS Compliance' go hand in hand, this is a must read.


The third chapter is shared below and answers the question more directly.


But if it's all far too TL;DR, then you should only customise your application if you answer yes to these questions:


1/ Is my core CV good enough? Good enough is your minimum acceptable level - not the goal - and I'm sorry to say the vast majority of CVs do not meet this threshold.

2/ Do I know the hierarchy of decision making in the hiring process, and what each stakeholder needs from the application?

3/ Does the advert speak to me personally? If it's a generic document, you can bet your customisation will look precisely the same as every other person taking the good advice to customise their application.

4/ Could the employer or agency have further vacancies, now or in future, that I am better suited to?

5/ Does my customised CV resemble my LinkedIn closely enough that it doesn't appear to lie?

6/ Am I articulating applicable skills, direct qualifications and relevant experience in the language of the vacancy?

7/ Does the time taken to customise outweigh the speed needed to apply?

8/ Am I 100% focused on the jobs that best meet my strengths?

9/ Is this a better use of my time than the harder activity I've been putting off?

10/ When applying through a job board, is this CV optimised to be findable for my ideal role through their CV database?


I'm sure there are more, but these are a good start. The three chapters explain why you should ask these questions first, so you can make sure your strategy works for you.


And these are the basis for my side of the discussion tomorrow.


34 - Should I customise my CV?

 

It depends.


Am I qualified?


Strip away bad behaviour, laziness and discrimination, and ask any hiring manager what they want from an application.

I’d wager the most common answer will be -


‘Qualified candidates’


Qualified goes beyond capability.


Can we identify any insurmountable nos?


This might be experience, qualifications, assumption of salary level or commutability, availability, or a lack of work permit.

Often it comes down to assumption. Fair or not, it’s their assumption to make.


All we can do is show how we qualify.


Ask these same hiring managers what proportion of applications aren’t qualified enough, and the answer will be anywhere between 75% and 100%.


Many of these will be wing and a prayer or automated applications. White noise that detracts from qualified candidates.


If you truly are a best-fit candidate for a vacancy, how would you feel if unqualified applications took attention away from you?


In a world where job seekers are often told to ‘shoot your shot’, is it possible that you’ve been an unqualified candidate on occasion?


When looking at any advert, ask yourself -


Am I qualified to do this job?


If yes, ‘How will my application demonstrate that I am qualified?’


This informs whether and how you should customise a CV.


Most jobs are learnable, using transferable skills.


If everyone can learn and has similar transferable skills, neither of these is a remarkable quality. They don’t stand out and they don’t inherently qualify you for a vacancy.


I expect that a significant proportion of what are considered to be unqualified candidates could ‘do that job’ with sufficient support.


It’s just that the expectation is other applicants can do the job better or achieve sufficiency sooner.


This may be perceptual and unfair. It is how many people make decisions when recruiting.


Instead, the onus has to be on the applicability of what we offer.


What’s in it for them?


Can you show how each facet of your candidacy applies in the context of the vacancy?


If you can’t, the decision is likely to be against you in a competitive market.


If you strongly believe you are qualified for points you are always rejected for, you have to articulate why.


This may be for as simple a reason as living 70 miles from their office.


They assume it’s too far and say no.


You’ve been commuting 75 miles for 10 years, and you know you are qualified. Say so.


Same with salary. They judge you were probably on £70k and their budget is £60k max - it’s not going to work.


You’ve done the maths. It’s a great job, the salary is fair, and it’s affordable. Say so.


Or those career gaps.


‘This person’s unemployable - no work for three years!’


‘When I was made redundant, I had the opportunity to support my ailing mother. She passed away in March, and I’m ready to work.’ Say so (and I’m sorry for your loss).


When we talk about being qualified, it’s often more about the skills and capability required to do a job.


If you know you can do the job, show how in your application. This should be the core part of your proposition in words a reader will accept to help us make the right decision.


If you can’t achieve this in your application, you may not be seen to be qualified.


‘Core part’ is important, because you may be someone who has an excellent track record, and a small part of your expertise relates to the core of a vacancy.


You may be able to show this in your application.


However, if you are competing against candidates whose main expertise is the core of the vacancy, you may be perceived generally as a weaker candidate.


An exception might be if you can demonstrate specifically how your wider experience solves problems the vacancy will have.


How can you glean that from a generic advert?


If you aren’t getting any return from customising CVs, it’s because you aren’t seen to be a qualified candidate (if your CV is even seen at all).


And if you can’t provide suitable and sufficient evidence that you are a qualified candidate, you should save your time by not applying.


Whenever I talk to job seekers frustrated by spending hours on customising CVs only to be knocked back instantly, I’m equally frustrated to say they probably never had a chance with those applications.


Strip those applications away and focus on the ones you can show qualified candidacy for quickly.


You’ll save a lot of time and frustration and you’ll IMPROVE your odds, by giving you more time to focus on what matters - more suitable vacancies and different job search activities.


You’ll also improve the odds for more qualified candidates.


Customise to beat the ATS!


Okay, if you’re worried about beating the bots - reread the ATS chapters (p29).


Worry more about being human optimised with a ‘good enough’ CV - it will be implicitly ATS compliant because of what an ATS is.


Yes, solutions are changing all the time, yet as ‘AI’ evolves on recruitment platforms, it will emulate how humans parse documentation.

Appropriate human optimisation is still key, our warts and all.


Not keyword bombing and ‘93% ATS compliant’ piffle.


Good enough


The argument that you should customise your CV against every application to maximise your odds seems to make sense.


Yet, it neglects one key principle. That your starting CV is good enough.


In many applications I see, they are not.


I don’t mean that they haven’t been customised, I mean that they aren’t fit for purpose.


And if that’s the case with your CV, customising only covers over the cracks in a weak document.


CVs in general are weak in specificity, context, applicable skills and readability.


Because people in good times often get by on weak documentation. Jobs are aplenty, suitable candidates competed for - you can succeed with less.


In bad times, good enough has to be a minimum, and most fall short.


I had a debate with a career coach recently who challenged me that ‘good enough’ will never get you a job - why would you always want to be sixth place?


Yet if CVs aren’t good enough to start with, there’s little point in chasing perfect - the most subjective of principles.


If you don’t get past the first sift, you won’t even get to sixth place.


Get the objective principles right and build from there.


Besides, everyone has an opinion on what good looks like in CVs. Perfect for one may be rubbish for another. Quite the stinger when you’ve paid for perfection.


Good enough is about reaching an objectively good CV-state for your context, which depends on all those factors unique to you - your skills and candidacy, the state of your market, the volume of competition and vacancies.


Good enough shows you in your best light, highlighting your candidacy for the role you are most suited for.


You can’t be all things to all people - good marketing is about leaning into what makes you, you.


Get your CV right, and it’s the basis for non-application activities:


  • Your LinkedIn profile (given it should be consistent with your applications)
  • A document you share in networking (there’s no point customising here)
  • A CV that may be found on CV databases (read Better Use of Job Boards - p211)
  • A CV you’ve used for an application you were rejected for, then logged onto an ATS which is visible to the hiring team for more suited vacancies they may not even advertise
  • The basis of how you describe yourself in personal branding, elevator pitches, doorknocking and any other commercial-type activity that can put you closer to a job


A CV isn’t just an application tool, it’s the anchor of your professional identity.


It isn’t just an outbound document, it can attract inbound interest.


And if you get it good enough, any customisation should be minimal, allowing you to apply for suited vacancies more quickly.


Quality of information


Let’s face it, most job adverts and job descriptions aren’t fit for purpose either.


Your experience of generic, misrepresentative job adverts mirrors how recruiters experience generic, misrepresentative CVs.


Those carefully written adverts that appear to speak to you directly… well those are good enough adverts to spend time on.


For the rest, would it make much difference if you relied solely on the job title, working arrangements and salary? Perhaps industry and product type, too.


‘Here at Bircham Wyatt Recruitment, we are a market-leading progressive innovator of fast-paced all-level communication.’


A lot of words which say nothing at all.


And because everyone uses them, they lose meaning - as with transferable skills.


Strip all the twaddle away, and if those top-level points are adequate, I expect you’ll go straight to Essential Requirements to see if you are qualified.


The problem with generic adverts is that these Essential Requirements may also lack Essential Specificity. What’s misrepresentative?


What’s missing? What are they really looking for?


This is often hidden pain that is key to unlocking a vacancy – something I write about in more depth, in the next chapter.


If you aren’t certain on these points, what are you customising against?


Could it be you accidentally edit out what makes you most suited to a vacancy, if what they leave unsaid is the most important piece?


Sometimes this is down to carelessness by the employer - sometimes it’s deliberate:


I once placed an HR Manager at a ‘rapidly growing’ company. They didn’t tell me or her that the thing they needed most was her mass-redundancy experience, which was what she was tasked to do on day one.


The truth was the opposite of their job description.


And sometimes different stages of the hiring process have different priorities, which may never have been articulated in the advert:


Administrator, Recruiter, Line Manager, Head of Department, Director...


A messed-up perfect storm


If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably been looking for work for a while, in a competitive marketplace with too many qualified candidates, far too many applications, and too few viable vacancies.


Plus, technology that encourages speed and volume.


And under-resourced, over-worked hiring teams, many of whom don’t do hiring as a day job.


Have you ever spent an hour customising a CV only to learn you were application number 232? Without knowing they’d closed applications at 200. And you received an instant rejection?


Sometimes, it may be a question of speed over quality.


How do you find the right balance?


Reciprocity in action


For advertising, the balance is simple.


Invest as much time in your application as their effort in the advert.


For a transactional generic advert - apply transactionally, diarise a follow-up, move on.


Keep these in a transactional fire-and-forget pile.


For the adverts that speak to you personally or take time and care to accurately articulate what the role is and what it offers you, reciprocate this effort in your application.


Keep these in a non-transactional pile.


Measure your return separately.


You’ll find a higher hit rate in the second, with the virtuous circle of your added investment.


While the lower hit rate of the first is mirrored by not needing to have put so much of yourself into it.


What about AI?


There are many wonderful AI tools available, and if you want to take the time out of customising CVs, automating seems a great opportunity.


What exactly are they customising against?


Because the quality of information you can convey is based on situational insight, it seems to me that AI can only tweak terminology or regurgitate what others have already written.


If everyone uses AI in this way, the output is generic resulting in same-same messages and CVs at scale.


This is what I’m hearing from people who are recruiting - reams of identical looking applications that lack punch.


It doesn’t help; it works against you.


For ideation, research, analysis, it’s an effective tool. Ask it which areas of a job description you might focus on selling your experience against.


For applying at scale, for now, it’s part of the noise.


Should I customise my CV and how?


It depends.


If your CV is already ‘good enough’, it shouldn’t take too much time to show how you meet the essential requirements of an advert.


If an advert sings to you and you feel inspired to put your best foot forward, you should (maybe check it’s still live first).

  • Use relevant impact based achievements. ‘I did x by y resulting in z’
  • Show relevant context - if your last employer was a context fit, show how. E.g. Rapidly growing scale-up, 50 to 250 in one year, t/o £24m. Or 500 staff, manufacturing of precision components for aerospace, significant downsizing programme
  • Align your language to theirs - they say PDCA, you said CI. They say S&OP, you said integrated business planning. Don’t fabricate
  • Remember - what’s in it for them? How will you solve their problems or help them reach their desired outcomes?


For other situations, I’d question whether the marginal gain of customisation should be set aside for what may be the maximal gain of what you don’t want to do:


Networking, doorknocking, personal branding, and all those other inbound and outbound activities that might get you closer to a job.



Salary on the job description

By Greg Wyatt • November 11, 2026
I've written many variations on the article below, over the years, and it seems sensible to revisit given the UK government's announcements around salary transparency. On the whole, I'm for it, with the many advantages it brings. But like a lot of things in recruitment, there is a more involved discussion to be had, especially when this fix treats the symptoms, not the rot. That's not to say the fix isn't worth doing, just that it won't fix many of the problems underlying a lack of transparency. This article is a little dated, in terms of the research shared, but I think the points are as relevant as ever. Originally published May 2023 Salary on the Job Description? Yes, the headline is trolling. The question should be ‘salary on the job advert?’ You wouldn’t confuse a job description with an advert, would you? This is a subject rife with disagreement around ethics and practicality, and worth broaching again considering recent campaigns in the UK to increase salary transparency and ban the ‘what’s your current salary?’ question. Let’s focus on some practicalities first, based on UK research I ran last year for my “Accessing a Candidate Short Market” guide:  Job boards can penalise you for not listing salary. As of December 2021, Totaljobs penalises adverts that don’t list salary, and these aren’t sent out as job alerts to candidates (who may be passive). These adverts are considered sub-standard. Unlisted salaries attract fewer qualified applications. This was estimated to be between 20% and 45% fewer, across the job boards I talked to. LinkedIn reported that not only can you expect more applications, you may also expect better-qualified applications when the salary is advertised. My work supporting senior job seekers confirms this - many would not apply to adverts that had no salary or "competitive salary" because they felt this was a waste of their time. There is less emphasis on salary negotiation from the candidate side, due to transparency in pay. This is a key part of equity, relating to gender, race and intersectional identity. According to Payscale 's research, white men are most likely to negotiate the highest salary. It’s simple – if you advertise vacancies and don’t list salary, you risk receiving fewer, less suitable applications. Then there’s the ethical question, where a common argument is that there is ‘no ethical reason that salaries can’t be listed’. Now, while I’m a proponent for advertising salaries, where possible, I think this ethical argument isn’t the right one - ‘can’t be’ is a strong statement. I think a better question is ‘how does this do harm’ when establishing reasons for not listing salary. This balances pragmatism with the most important aspect of ethics. It can be a complicated question too in scenarios like this: How do you establish salary transparency for job families across multiple regions where the local pay is established by HQ in one country? Currency exchange rates and cost of living mean that a fair salary one day may not be the next, therefore flexibility in not listing salary may be ethically the right thing to do if the intent is right. What about new vacancies that serve to solve a business problem and can be recruited at different levels? What about practical situations like recruiting hard-to-fill vacancies during a wider redundancy programme, whereby listing a salary would create concern in unrelated areas of that unsettled business? It's not always as simple a question as we’d like to think. If you’re facing a complex situation in advertising a role, I recommend describing your stance in the advert itself, if you legitimately can’t state the salary. At the same time, as we’ve seen in the US, legislation to enforce salary transparency creates situations such as Netflix apparently advertising a range of $90-900k. Who does that help? The problem with this kind of legislation is that companies can comply while continuing the behaviour that led to the legislation in the first place. It’s palliative, rather than treating unfairness at its root. We should also consider the unforeseen consequence of salary transparency, such as this research which appears to show a reduced link between performance and pay: Influence of Pay Transparency Helping candidates negotiate better pay or terms is a privilege I enjoy. And there's more to understanding someone's existing remuneration than simply establishing whether they can afford to move. Sometimes these conversations reveal that someone is being underpaid. With evidence of what their experience and contribution might command elsewhere, they can go back to their current employer and make the case for a pay rise. That might mean they decide not to move at all. Which is a perfectly good outcome for them, even if it isn't for the vacancy in the short term. It also opens up the counteroffer conversation early. If their employer could resolve the reason they're considering leaving, I'd rather understand that before they accept an offer elsewhere. There's a benefit for prospective employers too. A new employer may budget £52,000 for a role, believing that to be market rate, based on historic data. But if conversations with suitably experienced candidates reveal that their existing remuneration, expectations and other opportunities consistently indicate otherwise, there's good reason to revise either the budget or the requirements. If that budget does prove unrealistic, and it's the same budget other team members are measured against, it can also create the argument to revisit everyone's salaries - subject to affordability, of course. After all, it's cheaper to retain fairly paid staff with all the knowledge they have than to replace them. Of course, conversations with candidates aren't a substitute for proper salary benchmarking. But they can reveal problems that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. There are also situations where understanding the whole package matters. What if someone currently receives a 16% pension contribution and moves to a role offering a 10% pay rise but only a 5% pension? Car allowances, RSUs, tax-efficient packages? Remuneration is a more involved conversation than simply salary. And none of this means someone's existing salary should determine what they're worth to their next employer. If their previous salary was unfair, using it to determine their next salary risks perpetuating that unfairness. And if an employer routinely offers a 15% increase on previous earnings, the new salary may have little relationship to the contribution that person can make. It makes sense to pay commensurately with contribution and capability, rather than what may be irrelevant history. So I understand the reasons for wanting to ban questions about previous salary. They're often used badly. But I think there's an important distinction between asking to establish someone's worth and asking to understand their circumstances. One can perpetuate unfairness. The other can help identify and correct it. If legislation restricts these conversations, I'll adapt how I offer this support. But I'd hope any restrictions recognise the difference between using salary history to determine an offer and voluntarily discussing remuneration to help someone make better decisions. I hope you’ve found these thoughts helpful to start a broader conversation in your business. My thoughts aren’t set in stone, so please let me know your opinions if you disagree. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. While you are here, if you like the idea of improving how you recruit, lack capacity or need better candidates, and are curious how I can help, these are my services: Commercial, operational and technical leadership recruitment Manage part or all of your recruitment on an individually designed basis for one client Outplacement support Email me on greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk if you'd like to discuss.

Tone deaf - No problem, pt 6

By Greg Wyatt • November 5, 2026
It's interesting revisiting this article from 3 years ago, especially now AI products are more embedded in market. If anything my view on AI is more polarised, bringing many new opportunites, brand new problems, as well as the existential angst many are talking about. For me, codifying my experience with AI tools means I can help more people, while freeing up my time to do more human work. It's certainly helped with job seeker support, and increasingly so in my recruitment work. Mainly it's giving me more time to talk to people, and when homogenous AI applications at scale are one new problem, as well as the increasing threat of deep fake interviews, in person conversations might be a necessary exnovation (just googled that - what a great word that I will now abuse at scale). While the article below has dated somewhat, I think the threat it assesses has never been more pertinent. I've said for some time that AI might be the death of knowledge and judgement, even so far as 'meaning', something that this recent research also indicates . Importantly the research doesn't say the recommendations were wrong, just how they were followed. Read that article and think about how AI recommendations on applications relate. I've certainly found them more problematic, so far, than the old school ATS style ranking and filtering - because of the false confidence they convey, especially when dealing with non-traditional applications. Things may improve, or so is promised. And while words might be the first facility of LLM, they are still the core facility, given all it does is determine the most probable answer in its outputs (I know I'm being reductive, some of the developments from AI are amazing). Whereas words should be the consequence of thoughts, lead to the development of thought, and distil ideas in a way you can act on. Much like job adverts should be the consequence of effective job analysis, rather than a polished word that lacks meaning. The greatest risk for me in recruitment isn't so much the answers AI offers, but that we become so reliant we forget to ask better questions. I've edited down the previous article, but if you're curious, you can see it here . September 2023 I’d commented about my hearing on a social media post on deafness. ‘Have you looked into these hearing aids - they’re designed to overcome head shadow’, came the impromptu reply from a hearing aid specialist. Head shadow? Not a phrase I’d heard before, despite having no hearing on one side, which effectively creates a sound-free shadow to my right. See, when I had mumps at 18 months it killed the vestibulocochlear nerve in my right ear and damaged the one on the left. But it was my balance that showed the nursery assistants that something was wrong - I kept falling over for no reason. I expect they thought my slow response was normal naughty-boyness. Balance, intermittently poor audio processing, energy required to maintain attention in noisy environments and that bloody tinnitus - all these issues are far more annoying than not being able to hear in one ear. That and not being able to tell where sounds come from. “Over here, Greg!” is the most useless call on a football pitch. And the head shadow thing? Well, it’s never been an issue - I just turn my head when in conversation. It might look like I’m turning to kiss you, but it’s just a conversation I want honest. Sure I miss out on certain audio cues, but it’s rarely an issue. Anyway, curious as I am I looked into the £4,000 hearing aid that solves head shadow by placing a microphone on the deaf ear and projecting it into the the good ear. Quite the brute force tech solution and one I’m sure some benefit from. But the key issue is one of reverb. While the product is good, it would impact the quality of sound in my good ear, which seems a pointless trade-off for me, when my process of life is more effective than shiny tech. It’s ironic that I consider myself highly excitable when it comes to technology developments, yet I’m never an early adopter. Because I always ask myself, other than giddiness, what problems does this solve and how will it enhance my life. And so it is for AI in recruitment, and the shininess of tech in general. They are positioned as solving problems, and indeed they do, but in many cases, it’s the wrong problem that detracts us from the real opportunities for better processes. Simpler administration, speed and scale are clear benefits. And some of these AI-branded automations are excellent. The Star Trek-style auto-translator makes me giddy. As does the sales bot conversation-as-a-human sales video that’s doing the rounds. But AI for writing? What problem does that solve? For me, it depends on what you consider sales to be. Is sales pitching a generic message and hoping someone will bite? Or is sales laying out the facts so that the right person can reach an objective decision? A decision which might mean getting in touch, or changing their view on what needs recruiting. For the former AI writing seems to solve a problem. The words are certainly better, but the message is even worse. Yes: prompting. But if you can prompt the right message, why aren’t you just writing it, so that you embed that knowledge for use across other mediums - conversations, meetings and so on? While AI writing does not meet the requirements for the second type of sales. You can only do this by establishing the right facts from a briefing, consultation or interview. Then interpret this with meaning to the right people so that it creates the right impact. Sales as data visualisation, if you will. And if AI doesn’t work for sales in this way, why would it work for content or marketing? I think the answer depends on whether you value contextual insight or not. Until AI is better at asking questions that create meaningful conversation, it’s a non-starter for me. I say until because this hesitation will be moot in the next year or so. Because it isn’t what AI is now that’s the opportunity - it’s what’s coming soon. I can’t wait to see what’s next. Until then, AI, for writing, is a question of in one ear and out of the other. Which, if you’re deaf in the one, is quite the problem. Go learn copywriting instead, and listen to how it transforms your approach to recruitment. Then layer tech on top, when it’s ready. Thanks for reading. Regards, Greg p.s. If you like good recruitment and you need help with it in the UK, drop me a line. DM on LinkedIn, email greg.wyatt@bwrecruitment.co.uk , whichever you prefer.