Tailor Your Resume to a Job Description with AI

Most job applications fail before a human reads them. Applicant Tracking Systems score your resume against the job description and filter out anything that does not match closely enough. If the posting says “cross-functional collaboration” and your resume says “worked with multiple teams,” an ATS may not connect those as the same thing. A recruiter would. The ATS will not.

Tailoring a resume manually for every application is tedious enough that most people do not do it, or do it once and call it done. Claude makes it fast enough to actually be worth doing every time.

Getting the Input Ready

You need two things: your current resume as plain text, and the full job posting.

For the resume, copy and paste the text directly. Do not paste a PDF export full of formatting artifacts. Open your resume in Word or Google Docs, select all, copy, and paste into the prompt. If your resume has columns or tables, the text may come out scrambled, in which case paste it section by section in the correct reading order.

For the job posting, copy the full text, not just the headline. The detailed requirements section at the bottom of most postings, the part most candidates skim, contains the specific phrases and skills the ATS is looking for. Get all of it.

One useful habit: before you run the prompt, read the job description and underline every requirement you genuinely meet. That gives you a quick sanity check on the output. If Claude surfaces a match you did not notice, great. If it invents a match that is not there, catch it before it goes out the door.

The Prompt

You are an experienced career coach and ATS optimization specialist.

I will give you my current resume and a job description. Your job is to rewrite my resume so it is specifically tailored to that role.

Rules:
- Do NOT invent experience, skills, or achievements I have not mentioned
- Mirror key phrases and terminology from the job description where they genuinely match my background
- Reorder bullet points so the most relevant experience appears first under each role
- Strengthen weak bullet points by adding specificity and impact (numbers, outcomes) where I have provided enough context
- Flag any requirements in the job description that I don't clearly address -- list them at the end as "Gaps to address in cover letter"
- Keep the format: Name, Contact, Summary, Experience, Education, Skills
- Output a complete, ready-to-use resume -- not just a list of changes

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MY CURRENT RESUME:
[PASTE FULL RESUME TEXT HERE]

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JOB DESCRIPTION:
[PASTE FULL JOB POSTING HERE]

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Now produce the tailored resume, then list any gaps at the end.

The “Gaps to address in cover letter” section at the end is the most underrated part of this prompt. It tells you exactly which requirements your resume does not cover, before you submit. That is information you can actually use.

What You Get

A complete, ready-to-paste resume tailored to the specific role. The main differences from your original:

The summary at the top will mirror the language of the posting. If the job emphasizes “client-facing experience” and you have it, the summary will use those words rather than a generic description of your background.

Bullet points under each role will be reordered so the most relevant ones appear first. This matters because most people read the first two or three bullets under a job title and skim the rest.

Weak bullets get tightened. “Managed social media accounts” might become “Managed four social media accounts with a combined following of 12,000, increasing engagement by 34% over six months” if you provided that context in your original resume. Claude does not invent numbers. It promotes numbers you already had but buried.

At the end, the Gaps list. Read it carefully. These are requirements from the posting that your experience does not clearly address. Some gaps are fine to leave unaddressed. Others are worth a sentence in your cover letter explaining your plan to close them.

Before You Submit

Read the entire output as if you are a skeptical hiring manager. Every claim in the tailored resume should be accurate and something you can speak to in an interview. If a bullet point has been rewritten in a way that sounds slightly more impressive than what you actually did, edit it back down. Getting to an interview under false pretenses helps no one.

The “Gaps” section at the end does not go in the resume. It is a note to yourself. Copy it somewhere useful, like into your cover letter draft or your pre-interview prep notes.

Once you have a good base resume for a role type, the next application in the same category takes about two minutes. Paste, run, review, done. That is a reasonable amount of effort for a role you actually want.