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.



How to doorknock

By Greg Wyatt • June 11, 2026
What follows is Chapter 43 from A Career Breakdown Kit. Is it a magic salve guaranteed for success? No of course not. But much like anything in a job search, nothing is guaranteed. What we do is identify which avenues can be effective for your context, and form an appropriate strategy. LinkedIn optimisation is great if people search for you on LinkedIn. Except speaking to my recruitment peers, fewer and fewer rely on it. Would it surprise you if I told you I rarely invested in at all before 2019? I've been working in recruitment since 1996 including at CEO level. Applications, networking, referrals, content, CV databases. All have a place and a purpose. Doorknocking on the other hand - some would tell you it has no place in the modern job search. If my daughter*, her friends and other 18 year olds can get a job from an old school technique, while those employers say "only through Indeed" then that might be a hint it still works. Some of whom are socially anxious, but then it's a replicable process, not a cult of personality. Or the periodic messages I get from CxOs who made their own jobs from direct outreach. Not forgetting Granovetter's seminal research and recent LinkedIn-specific studies in Science journal showing weak ties drive more job mobility than strong ties. And why wouldn't doorknocking work on LinkedIn, when you have a weak tie that suggests a viable employer? But no, it's not a guarantee. It's just an arrow in the quiver of a multichannel job search. 43 - How to doorknock Doorknocking is an old-school sales approach you may well have experienced, such as when a salesperson with a clipboard rings your doorbell and asks you to change electricity provider. My wife even once bought from exactly this scenario. While it’s not uncommon in a business-to-consumer situation it can also work business-to-business… if you can get past security. Although technology has moved on, the principle is the same whether in person, by phone, email, letter or LinkedIn: You approach someone cold and create your own opportunity. This isn’t an approach for everyone and requires chutzpah. If you are used to a high failure rate in applications - what do you have to lose by being proactive? More than that - look at all the advice on LinkedIn on how to improve your odds in a job search. It’s all transactional and applicable, available to everyone - if you all follow it, everyone takes the same step forward. While taking steps others are less prepared to do means the approach alone may stand out. If you encounter the equivalent of a sign which says, ‘Trespassers will be shot!’, pay attention. My own career of looking for work includes many non-transactional approaches: Walked into the local Cinema and asked for a job Walked into Office World and asked for a job Worked for Dad Talked to one of my ex-colleagues and gained some by-the-call phone research work Temped through an agency Walked into an Inn and asked for a job Referred to a publishing, training & consulting company In managing their small-scale recruitment alongside my day job I got to know the MD of a recruitment firm as a supplier. I went to work there Tapped up to return to a more senior role Started my business upon being given the boot - thanks Dave! It’s true I did apply through job boards and agencies. It’s mainly through my own means that I have secured my employment. *My daughter even tried doorknocking for her first job in our local town last summer. It didn’t work for her - she found a nice retail job through an application on Indeed. Her experience was positive enough that she helped a friend do the same - who got a job at the first shop they tried. Doorknocking is about approaching companies by category not because they are recruiting. These categories can be: All the employers in your local business park (often they have websites, with directories and job adverts) Companies listed in local newspapers, directories or platforms (local to me this could be Cambridge Evening News, Bury Free Press, Cambridge Network or Business Weekly) Top 100 employers in your domain Companies that have recently had funding and are about to scale Doorknocking companies you’ve come across through networking and its resulting market map Make contact and make a case for yourself on the principle of the right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. There’s an element of luck involved for these elements to all come together. A disadvantage is that they may not be recruiting or ever have a need to employ you and even if they do have a vacancy, you still have to establish the right fit. That means a logically low hit rate. Your threshold for an acceptable failure rate will inform whether this is the right approach for you. The difference is the anonymous rejection of a volume-based application versus the ‘personal rejection’ from your direct outbound approach. Right person, right time, right place, right message, right offer, and right price. Let’s reorder and examine this marketing principle: Right Place Those Categories above. The place is the Company, and how you contact them. You can go in blind if you are a bold prospector or research them in advance. ‘site:’ is a useful command in Google. You can search on specific websites: ‘site: linkedin.com ACME jobs’ Right Person Typically this will be the ‘next one up’ - Head of department, Director, CxO or Owner. Who would be the budget holder at work? Those are prospects. Look them up on LinkedIn, PR, news, video platforms. What can you find out? Right Time While time can be happenstance, can timed factors create opportunity? What might be a hiring trigger? Perhaps you could contact a list of companies that have recently announced funding or a big win - news that may lead to hiring additional people. Or maybe you hear through the grapevine that Janine is about to go off on maternity leave. If their process isn’t time-bound, can you make it time-bound? ‘We aren’t hiring right now’ might mean they’ve run out of headcount in the January to June period and may have a new budget in July. What can you learn that helps you both? If you have radio silence, why not try again in a month or three months? Think about how you buy. If you don’t need something how likely are you to respond to a message no matter how well crafted? If you do need something you might think first of someone who keeps in regular touch. Right Offer You have more opportunity for career creativity in being unemployed than someone entrenched in a 9 to 5 permanent job. What problems can you fix for a company in a non-traditional employment capacity? Let’s say an employer has a problem that needs fixing. They don’t have capacity to do it right now. It isn’t burning enough to seek professional help and there isn’t sufficient work in view to make it a job. What if you caught them at the right time? An out-of-work TA Manager who offered to revamp an onboarding process. A web designer who notes lots of issues with their website. A strategic operational issue that is their unknown unknown identified by your expertise. A swamped team that could benefit from their admin burden being reduced. An orchard that needs pickers at harvest time. What starts out as a short-term, project, or part-time piece of work can become proof of concept. While rare, I know a few people whose permanent full-time jobs have come about this way, including at a senior level. Right message This is both specific and crude. It’s specific because nailing the message CAN create an opportunity a poorly written message may miss. It’s crude because sometimes you can catch people at the right time, no matter how cruddy your message is. This is the case in recruitment - I’ve picked up several senior appointments by calling at the right time. ‘I’m glad you called Greg, I’m starting to think about my maternity cover in June.’ Had I not called, that HR Director may well have gone to the specialist HR recruiters she is also in touch with. If you have a strong hook in your message - such as a key area of rare expertise or a clear issue you’ve identified which companies may have - go in with that. If you don’t - done is better than procrastinating: ‘Hi Greg, I live locally to Bircham Wyatt Recruitment. Love what you do. I wondered if you might be recruiting for an apple picker at any point. If you can’t help, could you point me in the right direction?’ Right price I’ve left this until the end because much of this is variable and subjective. What are your needs? What can they afford? What does the market say? How flexible can you be? Research will help if you can get a sense of what they generally pay through Indeed, Glassdoor or others. Or maybe what comparable companies that are advertising will pay. One approach might be to pro-rate your salary over the period you’ll work there. Doorknocking can sometimes give you access to jobs that are being actively recruited. It’s a happy byproduct of your work, if you find yourself in this situation. It’s worth persevering. Otherwise, it’s too easy to think after 10, 20, or 100 unsuccessful efforts that the approach itself is at fault. There is always an element of luck in any activity. This may be out of your comfort zone, in which case it’s an opportunity to grow. The only certain thing is that if you don’t try you definitely won’t benefit.

Root Canal - No problem, pt 2

By Greg Wyatt • June 4, 2026
Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity. I do find it interesting go through my older articles. How has my thinking changed? Has it improved? How was I so cringy? Looking at this article in its August 2023 form, I hadn't yet focused on Candidate Resentment as an opportunity to improve how we recruit. Not because it's decent to treat people better, but because that is a happy byproduct of strategically assessing our work as it supports our goals. Whether that's filling vacancies or finding people that meet our goals long-term and flourish doing so. Root canal If you recognise that speaking to the potential problems of the people you want to engage is a good idea, you may also recognise why you shouldn't create any problems that push them away. Engagement is an ongoing process that carries through every stage of recruitment, even into employment. Yes, bring your candidates forward, in part by showing how you solve their career problems. But, don’t throw up unnecessary issues that undo your good work. Listening to the consequences of your recruitment process is an opportunity. Why did that candidate proceed? Why did another withdraw? What raised concern? What about the potential candidates we don’t even know about? What influenced their decisions? I’ve spoken to tens of thousands of candidates, prospects, applicants, and everything else, during my career. Out of curiosity, I’m always interested in what influences their decisions in their pursuit of a new career. What fascinates me is that these are the Gemba , the unknown unknowns that we can extrapolate into our own recruitment processes. What problems do they encounter elsewhere, that discourage them from applying, that encourage them to withdraw, and why? And how might we be guilty of the same? While if we are guilty, how can we fix these problems, so that the objection never comes up? Imagine that - the reader that might have walked away, who instead chooses to engage. This may seem an unknowable unknown, but one of the benefits of my job seeker work is hearing about the issues they encounter on their side of recruitment and how that may influence their decisions. Considering these are people that are very problem aware, their appetite for bullshit is in some ways higher than the problem unaware (passive in old speak). While in others, what you may consider normal behaviour, they consider red flags. While we can’t control the behaviour of candidates, we can learn what influences their behaviour and form a process that nudges, draws forward or mitigates when needed. What are we accountable for that might present a problem for a candidate we want to employ? Especially when, in normal life, moving jobs is one of the biggest stresses? How might we unnecessarily cause scepticism or anxiety? Auditing your own recruitment process as a mystery candidate is one opportunity. As is surveying your staff for their experience - with the caveat they are happy to be working for you, skewing their perception. Or perhaps they're terrified of losing their jobs. Do they really want to rock the boat with criticism? But it’s the candidates who withdraw, who hesitate, who object that can be the source of the biggest improvements. What would you say their common complaints are? You can look to LinkedIn for the answer, in their high-engagement posts. Salary on the job description (they mean the advert) ATS data duplication Responsiveness and transparency Tardy, bloated and unnecessary recruitment stages A robotic process that forgot they are human Which becomes your choice. Do you look within and challenge yourself with 5 Whys to see how you can improve? Do you take away problems before they can occur? Saving your candidates unnecessary toothache? Or do you lay blame on the areas you can’t control? Those are the questions. Regards, Greg p.s. I’m available for interesting work - UK key hires, fractional talent acquisition and recruitment writing. Maybe we can talk. p.p.s. A Recruitment AiDE is out now - the discipline for UK key hire recruitment