Tailoring an application without rewriting everything

Pull out the three outcomes the role is accountable for. If your CV does not answer those three within its first half, reorder before you rewrite. Separating what a posting requires from what it merely hopes for is the hard part — how to read a job description covers it.

Use the employer's nouns where they are accurate. If they say platform reliability and you have written system uptime, and the work was the same work, take their phrasing — not because a machine is counting it, but because a human reader should not have to translate.

Where the phrasing is not accurate, leave yours alone. A word borrowed for a thing you did not do is the beginning of an interview you cannot finish.

Your summary and most recent role carry most of the weight. Adjust emphasis there, keep the rest stable, and you protect both relevance and honesty.

In practice that means four edits and no more:

1. Rewrite the summary to answer this role's accountabilities, in this role's language.
2. Reorder the bullets under your most recent role so the relevant ones are first. Do not add any.
3. Cut one or two bullets that have nothing to do with this job. Length spent elsewhere is attention spent elsewhere.
4. Move a genuinely relevant older role or project up, if the chronology allows a projects section.

Fifteen minutes of that beats an hour of rewriting, and it leaves a document you can still defend line by line.

Dates, titles and scope are facts about your history and are not negotiable per application. Neither is the shape of the document: a CV rebuilt from scratch for each role accumulates small inconsistencies across versions, and the one that reaches a recruiter is rarely the one you proofread last.

Keep one master document and treat each application as a short, recorded edit of it. When a role asks for something you genuinely cannot show, that is information about the application rather than a prompt to adjust the document — how to check your CV against a job description is the check that catches it before the editing starts.

A letter that restates the CV in prose is a second copy of a document the reader already has. Its job is to carry what the CV structurally cannot: a decision, a discontinuity, a piece of context.

The things worth a paragraph are a career change and why, a gap and what was in it, a move to a new country or sector, a stretch you are making deliberately, and a specific reason this company rather than the category. That is the whole list.

Every draft Huntly prepares waits for your review. Read it once as the hiring manager would, then send it yourself.

Reading as the recipient is a different act from proofreading. You are asking whether the first six lines answer what this role is accountable for, whether anything in the document invites a question you would struggle with, and whether the company's name is right in every place it appears.