How to Optimise Your CV for Any Job (2026 Guide)

Updated 2026-04-24

A generic CV that's been sent to forty companies in a row will lose to a focused CV that was edited for that specific job — even if the generic CV has more on it. Optimising your CV for a job means two things: making it readable to the human at the end, and making it parseable by the ATS in the middle.

This guide covers both, with a 6-step checklist you can run on any CV in under an hour.

Why optimising your CV matters

Most applications go through an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before a human sees them. The ATS extracts text from your CV, matches it against keywords from the job description, and ranks candidates by relevance. If your CV doesn't include the right keywords — even when you have the experience — you don't make the shortlist.

After the ATS, a recruiter spends about six seconds on the first pass of your CV. They're scanning for fit, not reading top to bottom. The CV needs to make the right things obvious in those six seconds.

Both audiences (the ATS and the recruiter) reward the same thing: a CV that looks like it was written for this job, not for all jobs.

The 6-step CV optimisation checklist

  1. Pull the keywords out of the job description.
  2. Rewrite your headline to match.
  3. Re-order bullets so the most-relevant role is most-detailed.
  4. Quantify achievements that map to the JD's priorities.
  5. Drop or condense anything irrelevant to this role.
  6. Re-export as a clean PDF, not a designed PDF.

The whole process takes 30–45 minutes per application after you've done it twice.

How to tailor your CV to a job description

Pull the JD into a doc and highlight every concrete requirement. You're looking for:

  • Skills mentioned by name (e.g. "SQL", "Figma", "stakeholder management")
  • Tools and platforms (e.g. "Salesforce", "Looker", "Kubernetes")
  • Domain language specific to the company or industry (e.g. "merchandising", "underwriting", "growth loops")
  • Soft requirements repeated more than once (e.g. "ownership", "comfortable with ambiguity")

Now scan your CV against the highlights. For each match, make sure the keyword appears in your CV using the same phrasing as the JD. "Looker dashboards" beats "BI tooling" if the JD says Looker.

This is keyword-matching, not keyword-stuffing. Don't list a skill you don't have. Use the JD's language for the things you've actually done.

ATS keywords: how to find them and where to put them

The most reliable place to put keywords is inside achievement bullets, in context. ATS scoring weighs keyword frequency in the body more than in a "skills" section, because keywords stuffed in a list are less trustworthy than keywords used in actual sentences.

Three good places for keywords:

  • Headline / professional summary at the top — 2-3 lines, including the role you're targeting and your most relevant skill set.
  • Job titles if you can honestly adjust them to match the role's title (e.g. "Software Engineer" → "Backend Software Engineer" if you're applying for a backend role).
  • Achievement bullets under each job — describe what you did using the JD's vocabulary where it's accurate.

One place not to put them: a "Keywords" section at the bottom. Modern ATS deprioritise that signal because it's transparently gaming the system.

Common CV mistakes that hurt ATS scores

  • Two-column layouts. ATS often parse left-to-right, so a two-column CV can scramble dates and roles. Use one column.
  • Tables for layout. Same issue — tables get parsed unpredictably.
  • Headers and footers. Your name and contact details should be in the body, not in a Word header — some ATS skip headers entirely.
  • Graphics and images. ATS can't read text inside images. Skip the icon for "email" and just type the email.
  • Custom fonts. Stick to fonts that exist on every system: Arial, Calibri, Helvetica, Georgia.
  • PDFs from design tools (Canva, Figma, etc.) when they export with text-as-curves. Always check the PDF: select-all text and try to copy-paste it. If you can't, the ATS can't either.

Get a free CV review

If you want a second opinion on whether your CV is doing its job for a specific role, AI Job Answers has a CV Evaluation tab that reads your CV against any job description you paste and tells you what's strong, what's missing, and the top changes worth making. It's free.