Advice about tailoring is easy to agree with and hard to apply. This guide takes one posting and one résumé and shows each change, step by step. The posting, the candidate and every bullet below are illustrative: invented for this example, not taken from a real person or company.
If you want the method on its own, our guide to tailoring your résumé covers it in six steps. This one is the method in action.
The posting (illustrative)
Customer Success Manager at a mid-size B2B software company. Responsibilities: own a portfolio of mid-market accounts, run onboarding for new customers, reduce churn, and identify expansion opportunities. Requirements: 3+ years in customer success or account management, experience running quarterly business reviews (QBRs), comfort with a CRM such as Salesforce, and the ability to work with product and support teams. Nice to have: SQL, experience with a customer health score.
Step 1: Pull out the requirements
Split the posting into what is required and what is optional, and note the exact words it uses. Required: customer success or account management experience, onboarding, churn, expansion, QBRs, a CRM, cross-team work with product and support. Optional: SQL, customer health scores.
Note the terms that repeat or carry weight. Here, "churn", "onboarding" and "expansion" describe what the role is measured on, so they matter more than a passing mention of a tool.
Step 2: Map your evidence to each one
Our illustrative candidate is an Account Manager with four years at a small software company. Going through the list honestly: account management experience, yes. Onboarding, yes, she ran it for new clients. Churn, yes, though her résumé calls it "keeping clients from leaving". Expansion, yes, she sold add-on modules. QBRs, she ran quarterly check-in meetings with her largest clients. CRM, yes, but HubSpot, not Salesforce. Product and support, yes, she sent feature requests and escalations. SQL, no. Health scores, no.
This map is the most useful thing you will produce. It tells you what to emphasise, which words you can honestly borrow, and which gaps are real.
Step 3: The bullets before
Her original bullets, in the order they appeared: "Managed a book of 40 client accounts." "Responded to client questions and issues." "Kept clients from leaving by checking in regularly." "Helped new clients get set up on the platform." "Sold add-on modules to existing clients." "Used HubSpot to track client activity."
Nothing here is wrong. But the strongest evidence for this posting (retention, onboarding, expansion) sits in the middle and bottom, and none of it uses the posting's words.
Step 4: The bullets after
Reworded and reordered, using only facts from her map: "Owned a portfolio of 40 mid-market accounts, running quarterly business reviews with the 10 largest." "Reduced churn across the portfolio through scheduled check-ins and early escalation of at-risk accounts." "Ran onboarding for new customers, from kickoff to first live use of the platform." "Identified expansion opportunities and sold add-on modules to existing customers." "Worked with product and support teams to escalate issues and pass on feature requests." "Tracked account activity and renewals in HubSpot (CRM)."
What changed and why: "kept clients from leaving" became "reduced churn" because it is the same work and the posting's term. "Quarterly check-ins" became "quarterly business reviews" because that is what those meetings were. Onboarding and expansion moved up because the role is measured on them.
What did not change: HubSpot stays HubSpot. The posting says "a CRM such as Salesforce", so writing "HubSpot (CRM)" matches the requirement truthfully. Writing "Salesforce" would not. There is also no churn percentage, because she does not have a reliable number, and inventing one is the fastest way to lose credibility in an interview.
Step 5: Rewrite the summary last
Before: "Hardworking account manager with strong communication skills." After: "Account manager with four years in B2B software, focused on onboarding, retention and expansion across a portfolio of mid-market accounts."
The new summary says what she has done in the posting's terms. It leaves out SQL and health scores, which she has not used. Those are optional in the posting, so she can still apply, and she can talk about them honestly if they come up.
What not to do
Do not paste a block of keywords at the bottom, and do not repeat a term in every bullet. In Enhancv's late-2025 interviews with 25 US recruiters, 76% mentioned natural use of keywords, not keyword stuffing, as something they value.
Do not add skills you do not have. Adding "SQL" or "Salesforce" here would raise a keyword score and create a question she cannot answer. Do not change job titles, dates or employers to look closer to the posting. Tailoring changes order and wording, never facts.
Try it on your own résumé
Paste a posting and your résumé into Weydr's free résumé keyword checker (on this page, or at /resume-keyword-checker) to see which of the posting's terms you already use and which are missing. Then go back to your evidence map: add the missing terms you can back up, and leave out the ones you cannot.
To have a tailored draft produced from your own profile, see how Weydr tailors a résumé to a job description at /tailor-resume-to-job-description. Read every line it writes, and delete anything you could not explain to an interviewer.