Guide

How to tailor your resume to a job description — step by step

Tailoring your resume doesn't mean rewriting it. It means using the same words the job description uses to describe experience you already have. Here's the exact process — with real language swap examples.

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Step 1: Extract the signal from the job description

  • Read the full JD and note every skill, tool, and qualification that appears more than once
  • Look at the "required" and "preferred" sections separately — required is non-negotiable for ATS
  • Pay attention to role-specific vocabulary: exact tool names, framework names, methodology names (agile vs. scrum vs. kanban), and metric names
  • Note how the company describes the role — "growth engineer" vs. "full-stack developer" vs. "software engineer" — and match their language in your headline

Step 2: Find your keyword gaps

Instead of manually comparing, use Touchdwn to scan your resume against the JD. It surfaces every term that's in the job description but missing from your resume — saving you 15 minutes of guesswork.

Touchdwn keyword gap analysis:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Match Score: 63%

✅ In your resume:
   Python, data analysis, reporting,
   cross-team collaboration, dashboards

❌ Missing from your resume:
   dbt, Snowflake, SQL, data pipeline,
   stakeholder reporting, self-serve analytics

⚠️  Synonym gaps detected:
   "dashboards" → self-serve analytics
   "data work" → data pipeline

Fix these 6 terms to reach ~81% match.

Step 3: Make the language swaps

  • For each missing term you actually have experience with, find the bullet where you did that work and add the term
  • You don't need a new bullet — just update existing ones to use the right vocabulary
  • Example swap:
    Before: "Built internal reporting tools for the finance team."
    After: "Built self-serve analytics dashboards in Looker for the finance team, pulling from Snowflake via dbt models."
  • Another swap:
    Before: "Coordinated with stakeholders on project requirements."
    After: "Led stakeholder reporting cadence and aligned engineering and product teams on data pipeline requirements."

Step 4: Check your headline and summary

  • Update your headline to match the job title or close to it — "Senior Data Analyst" not "Data Professional"
  • Your summary should name 2–3 specific skills that appear in the required section of the JD
  • Don't use generic phrases like "results-driven" or "passionate about data" — they don't score anything in ATS

Step 5: Re-scan before you submit

After making your edits, run the resume through Touchdwn one more time. Confirm your match score is above 75%. If it's not, look at the remaining gaps and decide if any are addressable.

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