The Tailored CV

Your CV is probably the same one you sent for the last job, with three lines changed.

Writing a properly tailored CV for every role takes about two hours. Nobody sustains that across twenty applications, so almost nobody does it - and a generic CV gets filtered out by someone who is scanning for the things in their own advert.

This book is a working method for producing a genuinely tailored CV and cover letter for each role in about fifteen minutes, using an AI assistant, without putting a single untrue word on the page.

It is not a prompt you paste in to have a CV appear. Those produce documents that read like every other document produced the same way, and recruiters have learned to spot them. This is the full process: the master document every version is cut from, the standing rules that stop an assistant inventing experience you do not have, the loop you run for each role, and the check that keeps every line defensible when somebody asks you about it at interview.

Inside:

• The master document - everything you have done, with dates, written once


• Standing rules that stop an AI inventing your career for you


• Choosing a CV style that fits your sector instead of a template


• The fifteen-minute loop you run for every role


• Public sector application forms, supporting statements and competency questions


• Changing industry, and moving from contract to permanent


• Who actually reads your CV, and what each of the three readers wants


• The check - the most important chapter in the book


• Why a job search follows a predictable curve, and how to flatten it


• A prompt library, a master document template and a pre-send checklist

Written by a delivery manager with more than twenty years in the NHS and the wider public sector, during his own job search. The method was built under pressure, because the alternative was writing twenty CVs by hand and he could not face it.

One condition runs through the whole book: this works only if everything on the page is true and you can back it up. There is a chapter on exactly that, and it is the one that matters.