Are you tailoring your resume to each job posting?

You're ready to shake things up in your career, but you don't know exactly what you want to do next. All you know is you're done freelancing. As long as it's in-house, stable, and comes with benefits, you're interested.

Many of our clients feel this way and plan to put feelers out across the industry to land their next jobs. Although a more targeted approach will likely yield better results -- for instance, identifying a few companies that really interest you, or narrowing down job titles to those that include the skills you most enjoy -- it's completely understandable that you might want to test multiple waters as you make that career transition. But if you choose this path, you're going to need to spend a little more time than usual on your job applications.

Why?

Well, when you apply for a wide variety of jobs, you shouldn't be using the same resume for every application. Different positions require different skills, so you'll want to alter your resume accordingly. Look at the skills each posting asks for, and find the experiences you've had in the past that match what's listed. Think about everything you've done previously that qualifies you for the role, even if it wasn't a major aspect of your job, and include it on your resume.

You don't need to start from scratch every time. Instead, create a resume that encompasses all the different skills you bring to the table and orient it so it aligns with the jobs you're most excited about -- your professional summary (if you have one) and primary bullet points should match that particular type of role. This way, you'll have one resume for the bulk of your applications, and you may just need to do a quick keyword pass or remove one or two irrelevant bullet points each time.

But when you apply for a job that's a little different, you should revise your professional summary and reorganize (or rewrite) your bullets to match the specific nature of the role -- for example, if you're mostly applying for in-house producer roles at a network, but an open creative director role at a branded content firm catches your eye, you'd tweak your professional summary to include references to work you've done with brands and rearrange your bullet points to highlight skills related to integrations and branded content. 

If you're applying equally to wildly disparate jobs -- like a post-production supervisor and a marketing director -- you'll need two separate resumes as your base. It may seem like a lot of work, but it's better to spend a few hours crafting multiple resumes (or hire us to do it!) than to spend weeks or months applying for jobs and getting nowhere. A generic resume simply won't work in this case. For one, you'll be up against a bunch of more traditional candidates who have the exact experience the hiring manager is looking for. You're not going to be able to compete with them if you're forcing the hiring manager to do a ton of extra work to identify the skills they're looking for in your resume (trust us, they won't bother). Plus, hiring managers can tell when your resume is one-size-fits-all, and that doesn't convey passion for that company or role, nor will it convince them that you're a multi-talented hyphenate they'd be honored to have on payroll.

The bottom line: You'll have much better luck in the job hunt if your resume is targeted, focused, and tells a clear story to the hiring manager about why you're the right fit for that particular job. So take the extra time to tailor your resume to the job posting -- it will make your job search that much shorter!

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-- Angela Silak and Cindy Kaplan