Tailor Your CV To Any Job In 10 Minutes
Paste your CV and the job ad in together, get an honest gap read and a tailored rewrite that invents nothing.
You don’t have one CV. You have one work history with several true CVs hiding inside it.
The school office job, the customer service job, the two years helping your brother-in-law run his plumbing firm. Those same years can be told as “organised administrator”, “calm frontline problem solver” or “small business all-rounder”. All three are true. Tailoring is choosing which true version this job needs to hear.
Everyone knows it works. People send the generic one anyway, because tailoring used to cost an evening per application.
Before you start
- Find your current CV. Any state. “Embarrassingly out of date” is fine.
- Copy the whole job ad, including the responsibilities section everyone skips.
- Paste both into the same message. This is the bit people get wrong: they paste the CV and describe the job, or paste the ad and summarise themselves. The whole method rests on the model reading the two against each other.
The rule that goes in every CV prompt
It may reorder, reword and reframe what is already true. It may never invent a job, a duty, a qualification, a date or a number. If something is missing, it says so instead of quietly filling the gap.
Partly ethics. Mostly practicality: invented CVs collapse in the room, at the exact moment you can least afford it, under a friendly follow-up question about something you never did.
The prompt
Nick this one:
You're helping me tailor my real CV to one specific job. I'm not after a better sounding person, I'm after my own story told in the order this employer needs to hear it.
THE HONESTY RULE, AND IT IS NOT NEGOTIABLE: you may reorder, reword and reframe what's already in my CV. You may NEVER invent or exaggerate anything. No new duties, skills, results, titles, qualifications, dates or numbers. Not "led a team of 12" when it was me and Barbara on Thursdays. If something the ad wants is missing, tell me it's missing. Do not fill the gap.
MY CURRENT CV: [PASTE THE WHOLE THING]
THE JOB AD: [PASTE THE WHOLE THING]
Give me:
1. STRONG MATCHES. Where my CV already fits what they're asking for.
2. HIDDEN MATCHES. Experience I clearly have that my CV files under the wrong words. This is the important one: I ran the rota, they call it "workforce planning", same Tuesday, different dialect.
3. REAL GAPS. What I genuinely don't have, each marked load-bearing or nice-to-have.
4. THE TAILORED CV. A three or four line summary aimed squarely at this role, then my experience with bullets reordered and reworded so the most relevant things lead, echoing the ad's own language where that's honest. Two pages' worth, UK conventions, no photo, no date of birth.
5. FLAGS. Every line where you weren't certain my original CV supported the claim, listed separately so I can check each one.
Then give me the tailored CV as a document I can download.
Rules: plain confident wording, British English. No "passionate", "dynamic" or "results-driven" padding. Ask me up to three questions before you start, and pick the three whose answers would most improve the CV.Read section 2 before section 4. Most people don’t have a gap problem, they have a translation problem, and seeing your hidden matches listed out is worth the ten minutes on its own.
The cover letter, same chat
It already has everything it needs, so this takes thirty seconds.
Nick this one:
Now a short cover letter for this application, using only the CV and ad above.
Why I actually want it, in my words: [one genuine sentence, e.g. "I've done this job informally for two years and I'd like the title and the pay that goes with it"]
Give me:
1. The letter, under 250 words: why this role, my two or three most relevant strengths from the CV, a warm confident close.
2. One line telling me anything you had to leave out because I hadn't given you enough.
Give me the final version only. No options, no commentary.
Rules: same honesty rule, invent nothing. Sound like a person, British English. Never start with "I am writing to apply for". Ask me anything you need to know first.That bracketed sentence is doing real work. One genuine human line is the difference between a letter that reads like you and a letter that reads like everyone.
Then check it yourself, properly
Non-negotiable, and it takes four minutes.
- Read every line and ask: could I talk about this for two minutes if asked?
- Anything that makes you wince, overclaims, or does not sound like you, cut it or say it your way.
- Check the flags list, line by line, against what actually happened.
- Check the things it cannot know: dates, employer names, spellings, your postcode. An AI typo on your own job title is not the first impression you want.
The lines that survive this check are exactly the stories you’ll be asked about. You’ve accidentally started your interview prep.
What good input looks like
School administrator, applying for a customer services coordinator role. You paste the boring bullets too: “managed the absence line”, “coordinated parents’ evening bookings for 400 families”. The ad asks for “high volumes of enquiries handled with empathy and confidentiality”.
The gap read connects what you never would. The absence line is high volume frontline enquiries from anxious people. Parents’ evening is scheduling at scale. Nothing invented. Your Tuesday, translated into their Tuesday.
Honestly, the limits
It cannot translate what isn’t there, so include the messy detail. It cannot verify your dates or numbers. And tailoring improves your odds per application, it does not remove the lottery, so a rejection is not a verdict on you.
Tonight
Run it once, on the job you have been putting off. Even if you send nothing, you now own a tailored CV and a list of the words your experience should have been filed under all along.
Interview invitation landed? Practise The Interview Before The Interview is the next ten minutes to spend.
P.s. that is one application done properly. The Claude Kickstart does the same for your whole search, job hunters playbook included. £47, one weekend.