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.



An inverted job search

By Greg Wyatt • October 7, 2026
I realise I've shared this chapter fairly recently, but there's good reason to revisit it. On Friday, I launched a new AI tool - Your Job Search Plan. You can find it here: https://your-jobsearch-plan.netlify.app/ It's based on the inversion principle below: the optimal job search is an inversion of how that job is optimally recruited. In other words, the first step in a job search should be to understand how recruiters and hiring processes seek to fill your ideal vacancy. Then to access all those channels while putting your best foot forward. It connects your applications, your networking, your CV, your LinkedIn profile, and so on, all of which should stem from your professional identity, the context of your career, the market conditions for that career, and therefore the work you'll need to do to boost your odds. One thing I'm pleased about with this tool is how it relates to the other tools and resources on www.bwrecruitment.co.uk/resources . So what seemed abstract, or painful activities without guaranteed outcome, become a practical arrow in the quiver of your search. I hope you find these tools helpful. They are a starting point, rather than a resolution. 20 - An inverted job search So, your broad approach to looking for a job is based on a product marketing strategy. How does this link to your job search and how companies hire? The next step is to recognise a job search is an inverted recruitment process. Whatever you can learn about the actual workings of recruitment, the better armed you are to navigate them. The first way in which this is true is around the routes to market employers take to fill a job. Employers want to fill vacancies in the most economical and efficient means possible. Sometimes they’ll rely on external advice, sometimes they’ll figure out their own way, and sometimes they’ll employ people to do it for them (such as a Talent Acquisition Manager or internal recruiter). When they rely on external advice, it may not surprise you it’s as varied and contradictory as job seeker advice. Take this nugget of wisdom: 80% of suitable candidates are not actively looking for work. By advertising, you’ll only have access to the 20% that applies to adverts. Hang on a minute! Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like the hidden jobs market? Of course, candidates aren’t hidden - much like hidden jobs, the priority is to understand the channels through which candidates are found. These channels directly mirror the channels through which you look for that job: Job boards; LinkedIn; Recruitment agencies; Confidential headhunting; Internal promotions; Secondments; Temp-to-perm hires; Consulting-to-perm hires; Referrals; Networking; Speculative approaches; Careers pages; Talent pools; Candidate databases Every job is different, dictated by principles like supply and demand, confidentiality, reputational risk, wherewithal, budget and capacity. The hiring process of a Software Developer is different from that of a Sales Director. If an employer only hires through an advert - this means if you don’t apply for adverts, there’s no way in which you can be considered for that vacancy. A second way it’s accurate is the notion that what’s true for one may not be true for others. This relates to candidate resentment . You may read online that some recruitment behaviours are signs of a bad employer. Yet, you should always follow the instructions given when applying for an advert or through an agency. They may instruct you to: 1/ Write a CV, cover letter and duplicate it on their ATS 2/ Tell them your salary when they don’t list theirs 3/ Do 17 interviews before reaching a decision 4/ Deliver a 6-month strategy plan by presentation 5/ Or any other request deemed unreasonable by Career Coaches, Job seekers, or people otherwise uninvolved in that process What some consider red flags, others will deem acceptable practice. It becomes your choice to play the game or not. Either follow their instructions or step away. You don’t have to apply if you don’t want to. In a similar vein, if you hear a hiring process has a preference, or if there are gaps in their employment armoury - these might be biases you can lean into. The hiring manager loves Arsenal Football Club and is biased towards people who love the same? Now might be the time to switch allegiance, if you can fake it or make it. They love a one page CV? Apply with a one page CV. You know the hiring manager of an advert with 400 applications? Give them a call - they might give you an unfair advantage. Poor practice from the employer, yet these are problems you can turn into opportunity. A third way in which this is true is by comparing inbound and outbound activity Outbound activity is where you go to your prospect (phone calls, messaging). Inbound activity is where the prospect comes to you (job adverts, content). Yet an outbound activity for a recruiter is an inbound activity for you (you receive phone calls and messages). While an inbound activity has you getting in touch because of their advert or content. When we talk about optimising your work, whether your CV, profile or interviews, it has to give the process what it needs. How can you be more discoverable, so you receive more relevant calls and messages? How can you improve your return on applications and your outbound messages? What about inverse non-recruitment? A brilliant, if strange question, with the same answer. When networking, going direct, seeking to become a referral, doorknocking, or other, what is the inverse of that activity? How does that person find or recommend people, if they become aware of a vacancy? How might they see you as a person to solve their problems, even if it isn’t a vacancy? You do these activities because of how they might help you and because of the benefit the other party experiences. What’s in it for them? If there isn’t anything in it for them, why should they help you? For each and every stage in recruitment, there is an opposed force, as candidates and the hiring process meet each other. It’s rarely an equal force, because every vacancy has supply and demand, resource, skill level, biases and intent at play. This is why each type of role has a different method of looking for work. Executive vacancies typically prioritise headhunted candidates, with fewer public adverts. Here the priority shifts towards building relationships with, and being discoverable by, Executive Search recruiters. If executives rely mainly on job boards, they may never think to focus on more suited channels. If you can learn what the other needs for that process to be successful, you can deliver the same. Speak to peers, speak to hiring managers you know, speak to recruiters, speak to former job seekers. How have they found work, and how would they recruit for your roles? Research your market to find viable employers, to identify recruiters and to build your network.  Then execute an appropriate strategy to access these channels.

Hierarchy of Pain

By Greg Wyatt • September 23, 2026
I had an aborted conversation at a networking event on Tuesday. It was about a problem vacancy a fractional people lead was looking at. Her client had instructed various executive search firms and none had produced a viable candidate. It seems the consistent approach was to match CVs to job description - pureplay transactional - and none were candidates that met the goal of the vacancy. You see that organisational pain that the vacancy heals wasn't defined by documentation, and therefore if you rely on that documentation to find candidates, it's happenstance that you come across someone viable. It's such a common problem, and when I 'fix' problem vacancies, it's invariably something that isn't described which was holding back a successful hire. The irony is this shouldn't be a hidden pain - presuming it's appropriate to share, it should be front and centre. What complicates modern recruitment is that, instead of better specifying vacancies, both sides of the hiring fence increasingly rely on LLMs to produce documentation that shaves the edges off. And as a result a candidate that has extensively healed the hidden pain a vacancy might even remove the evidence from their application in a bit to better match an advert or job description. The more transactional recruitment comes, particularly through reliance on technology, the worse this problem becomes. Probably not an issue for business as usual vacancy, but when a vacancy has impact, standard process of "5 CVs by Friday" will invariably hold you back. The chapter below is from A Career Breakdown Kit , my guide for navigating a skewiff employment market. It may be for job seekers, but the problem and solution are directly mirrored by the hiring side. It's taken word for word from the book, so some of the content is interconnected with other chapters. You can read most of them for free in the Jobseeker Basics newsletter. Hierarchy of pain This chapter reflects on how buyers make decisions, how this is reflected in hiring and why it matters in how you put forward your CV, application, interviews and other messages. If you’ve ever encountered sales in your career or life you are likely familiar with the concepts of Features and Benefits. The product is what is proposed. Features are what it does. Benefits are how it helps. However there are actually three other components in this hierarchy that make up commercial messaging. Value is what the benefits mean to you. “Sell the sizzle, not the sausage” - the sizzle isn’t a benefit, if you don’t like sausages. Outcomes are the tangible long-term results from using that product or service. “Sell the picture frame, not the screwdriver” - or rather what’s in the frame. Why does it matter? The idea being these peel back the layers of the onion to help a potential customer understand exactly What’s In It For Them. Yet, it may not matter whatsoever if your brilliantly put together message doesn’t achieve one element - show how you heal their hidden pain. In that frame example above, this might be a photo of a loved one, no longer with us. The photo is for our memories and feelings. The frame has to be right, to commemorate them properly. While it needs to be mounted well, using tools that make the job easier. Could you market that loss to sell a screwdriver? Hopefully not, though the message might be, “For memories that matter,” instead of "High Quality Screwdriver". It's a common pain many share, yet not one you might discuss down the DIY shop. Early in my career I had a lesson on hidden pain and its importance. I recruited an HR Manager for a high growth business whose requirement was for someone with broad experience in a similar environment. I presented an excellent candidate who was only available due to the shutdown of her employer - she had to stay to the final day to manage the process well, which limited her availability to start work. That was the only reason I explained her current situation to this new employer, because redundancy management wasn’t on the job description. She got the job! On day one of her new employment, her role was made redundant and she was offered a retention bonus to shut down the local site - everyone was to lose their jobs. The hidden pain here was redundancy, something not even mentioned to me during the vacancy briefing, and something I never broached with Julie. IIRC, there was no mention of it during the interview process either. Perhaps that’s an extreme example, but it does show what can happen behind the scenes. And if you happened to be out of work, a fixed term contract with a retention bonus might be quite appealing. Were you to apply to that vacancy, it would be important to highlight your redundancy experience - customising your CV might even have worked against you! So how does this hierarchy fit within your job search? You are the product, with your next employer on a buyer’s journey. Your features are what you offer. In a CV this is a combination of job titles, qualifications, skills and areas of experience. It’s also your salary requirement, where you are based and other elements like Visa status and working arrangements. Get these right and a little luck might mean they are all you need, considering that these same elements are what we source and filter on. I expect in this market you’re in competition with many people that offer the same Features, so the differentiator is what you bring to the table uniquely. The contexts of your career combined with how you helped, your impact, your achievements, and what the outcomes were. Related chapters: Principles of a Good CV Should I customise my CV? LinkedIn profiles that get found LinkedIn profiles that convert These are all resources that will help you communicate the benefits of your experience, the value you bring, the problems you solve, and the outcomes of these solutions. As for the hidden pain question, which in many vacancies isn’t articulated, how can you unpick hidden? Go back to why vacancies are recruited. How did they come about in the first place? They only fit into two piles - new and replacement. However these two piles have many subcategories relating to the problems they solve and the pain they heal. Researching the company can help. Inside knowledge definitely helps - it’s one reason good agency recruiters will be a valuable ally. But this knowledge isn’t always available, and sometimes the employer may not even know! I always come back to the principle, “You can’t be all things to all people.” And when you try to do this, you appeal to no one. It’s one reason why using LLM style AI to customise CVs is so problematic. The output is necessarily same-same because it’s a probabilistic determination of what you want based on an aggregate of data. It’s why, when recruiters receive a volume of AI augmented CVs, they all look the same. Your ‘good enough’ core CV ( Should I customise my CV ) leans into your strengths. While you might tweak it to meet the essential requirements, in the language of the employer, this should naturally support your greatest strength - the unique fingerprint that is your career. The downside of relying on customisation against vague, and often misrepresentative, adverts is that you can deemphasise and even remove your biggest achievements. The same achievements that would have helped you stand out. If your application doesn’t heal the hidden pain of a vacancy, it’s either because you have not defined your strengths correctly or you aren’t that close of a fit with the actual needs of the vacancy. An example to show this pitfall in practice. I caught up with a friend yesterday who has resigned from a post that was missold to him. His career is based on commercial acumen and enablement in a field that is heavily focused on risk management and compliance. So he’s already unusual in a good way (though his CV didn’t show this). On day one of his new job, he encountered a literal unexpected disaster. While these things happen, and he managed the situation effectively, this proved a consequence of the business culture and strategy. These problems kept coming up and his functional area in the business needed a complete overhaul at executive level. Rather than the commercial enablement picture they painted, they needed someone who relished chaos - a master of disaster. Completely the opposite of the career Simon wants. This isn’t something they could publicise in their recruitment process, for reputational reasons, yet it was a fundamental baked-in aspect of the role. I’ve no doubt Simon’s CV is a match for their job description. Yet he is not a match for their job. What if they’d seen CVs of people who’d leant into strengths of healing dysfunction? What if he’d leant into his strength of enablement? He may not have left his previous job for something he went on to regret. If you’re sceptical about how crucial hidden pain is in recruitment, think about your own hidden pain when applying for jobs. What’s going on in your life that impacts which roles are ideal for you. The same points you might not divulge when you’re just trying to get back into employment. Perhaps you've even experienced the pain I did when considering a hardware purchase. How did that pain inform your buying decisions? It’s no different for employers when they consider the pain and problems inherent in their vacancy.