How to tailor a résumé to a job ad
If you apply to several roles a month, the résumé you send to each one should not be the same document. A hiring manager reads your résumé next to their advertisement, and the easier it is to match the two, the better your application reads. Tailoring is that matching work, and it does not require rewriting your history from scratch — most of it is reordering, rewording and pruning what is already true. Here is the way we would suggest doing it, in Australia, in under an hour per application.
1. Read the ad twice and split it
On the second read, sort every requirement into two lists: essential (the must-haves, usually the first bullet list) and desirable (the nice-to-haves that follow). Australian job ads are usually written so this split is visible — public sector ads state it outright. The essentials decide what must appear in your top third; the desirables are tiebreakers you should evidence only where you honestly can.
2. Map your evidence before touching a word
For each requirement, write down where your career shows it: a role, a project, a result. Requirements you can evidence go first. Requirements you cannot evidence get left alone — the honest answer to a gap is not a padded line but a résumé that leads with your strengths, and where relevant a cover letter that addresses the gap plainly.
3. Rewrite the top third toward the ad
The first screen a reader sees should speak this job's language: the profile or summary, the most recent role, the bullets that answer the essentials. Move your closest-matching bullets to the top of each role and drop the least relevant ones entirely. A four-bullet role where three bullets matter beats a seven-bullet role that buries them.
4. Use the ad's words where they are true
If the ad says stakeholder management and you wrote worked with clients, and the work was genuinely that, use their phrase. If the ad says budget accountability and you never held a budget, do not borrow the words. Swapping vocabulary is tailoring; swapping facts is fabrication, and it is the one habit that reliably unravels later in an interview.
5. Check the Australian basics
A4 page size, Australian English spelling, no photo, referees on request rather than listed, dates in a consistent format. Most advertised roles in Australia are read on a screen first, so a clean PDF with selectable text travels further than a designed image — and keep an editable copy, because you will tailor it again next month.
What a tool can do honestly
The steps above are mechanical enough that software can help with exactly two things: reading the ad into essential and desirable requirements, and proposing edits to your own bullets. It should never write achievements you do not have. GoodOnPaper is built around that line: it imports your résumé, reads the job ad, and shows every suggestion as your original text next to a proposed change with a reason — you accept or reject each one, and nothing is invented. The sample exports show what the result looks like, and the free tier lets you import, edit and check one résumé, with a single PDF export, before paying anything.
GoodOnPaper itself is designed, built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is how a small guide like this one stays accurate. If you are tailoring your next application, start with your résumé and paste in the ad.