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.