I Highlighted Everything My Resume And The Job Ad Had In Common. There Were Four Phrases.

Anyone ever sent in a job application you were confident you’d excel at and received…nothing?

Not even an email. Just nothing. So you log back onto the job board a few weeks later expecting your application to be gone, and instead the status still says “applied”-a miniature tombstone for your hope that someone out there was going to see you. That was me for three months last year, applying to jobs I was plainly qualified for.

Then a friend of mine who does recruitment said something that properly got me going. She said: you do know your resume and the job ad are two completely separate documents, written by two people who have never met? And somebody’s whole job is to decide, in about nine seconds, whether the two of them are describing the same person.

So I printed one out. Resume on one side, job ad on the other. Two highlighters, kitchen table, Sunday afternoon, and I marked everything in the ad that turned up in some recognisable form on my resume.

Any guess how many matches I found? Four. My god-four.

It wasn't a lack of skills. It was a lack of matching words.

Here’s the bit that pushed me to the brink, and it’s probably where most people get derailed.

I could do the job. I’d been doing it, in substance, for three years. But the advert said “stakeholder management” and I had written “liaised with external clients and other departments”. The advert said “process improvement” and I had written “pinpointed efficiencies and saved time”.

So what caused the mismatch? I’d chosen different words for my own work, and nobody noticed it was the same work.

I really hate this part. Stakeholder management-I want to be sick when I see those words. But the person reading my application has been handed a set of requirements and a document to check them against, and the first pass is usually done by a program rather than a human being. If I refuse to use their words to make a point, I’m effectively asking them to read my mind. They can’t. I checked.

The four heaps

What I do now takes maybe ten minutes an application, and it’s the cheapest change I’ve ever made to any of this.

Pull up the job posting and sort everything it asks for into four stacks.

One: things you’ve actually done and have clearly put on your resume. Don’t touch a thing. You’re done here.

Two: things you’ve done but haven’t talked about anywhere. This is usually the biggest pile by a mile. You don’t need to learn anything new or tell any lies, you just need to re-say what’s already true. Almost the whole four-highlighted-phrases problem lives in this stack.

Three: semi-related experience. You’ve dabbled, or you did a smaller version of it somewhere. Say so, honestly and specifically-“two years building reporting in Power BI” when they’ve asked for Tableau is a perfectly good answer, and anyone smart reads that as transferable rather than missing.

Four: the things you’ve never done. Be honest with yourself here. One or two out of ten? Apply anyway, that list is a pie in the sky wish-list some HR flunky half-assed together in twenty minutes. But half the list missing and you’re not being brave, you’re donating your Sunday to a stranger.

So now I pay attention to the second stack. Last time I did this properly I found six things I’d done and never written down anywhere. One of them was a project I’d led for seven months.

Seven months of effort, sitting there unrecorded, because it never occurred to me to write it down.

Ideal for three. A pain at twenty.

Let’s be honest about where the kitchen table strategy breaks down.

It works. It’s just so slow, and the slowness is what kills it. You end up sending the same dull resume to forty jobs because doing it properly feels like an hour you don’t have. By your fifth application of the day you’re not exactly at the top of your game-you’re jamming phrases in resentfully while the telly blares in the background.

So why waste the afternoon when a job fit score can compare your resume with the job description in about a minute? It hands you back a gap list and then you do the actual pondering. No more squinting between two documents.

And the genuinely useful part isn’t the number. A hundred-point scale is sort of interesting and sort of meaningless-a 72 is not a signal to go and put a suit on. What’s useful is the resume gap analysis underneath it: the list of things the program found in the ad and couldn’t find anywhere in your resume. Because that list is stacks two and four jumbled together, and separating them is a ten-second judgement you can make yourself, item by item.

A match score is a tool, not a scoreboard

Little reminder, because I know some of us have a tendency to get slightly obsessed.

A low resume match score on a job you desperately want is not a reason to walk away. It’s information about your resume, which you can fix tonight, far more often than it’s information about whether you could do the job, which you mostly can’t change. If the gaps are language gaps-stack two-then your real fit is much better than the number thinks, and the number moves the moment you edit.

The reverse is true as well, and slightly more dangerous. A high score doesn’t mean you’ve got it. It means your paperwork is legitimate. Everything after that is still a conversation with a human being who is privately wondering whether you’d be any good to sit next to for the next two years.

And a fair bit of what the job match analysis flags isn’t about the ad at all. It’s the structural stuff that’s been quietly broken for ages-a different problem, and one I carried around for years without noticing. I sent the same resume out for six years with a heading that was breaking it, so I’d sort that layer first before worrying about what any one advert happens to want.

Ten tailored beats forty identical, and I ignored that for a year

I know how that sounds. I’d read it fifty times and dismissed it fifty times, because sending forty applications feels like effort and sending ten feels like you’ve quietly given up around lunchtime.

But forty identical applications is one application, sent forty times. Nobody reading yours has any way of knowing you worked hard at it. All they see is what’s in front of them-a document that appears to have been written for nobody in particular.

Because it was.

What I do now, roughly. Browse job listings and save anything plausible without applying to a single one. Then sit down once, a few days later, and sort the ones that still look good with fresh eyes. About a third get binned at that stage, which saves more time than the tailoring costs-I did not expect that.

Then eight or nine real applications, where the top third of the resume uses the words the advert used, for things I’d genuinely done.

Do the highlighter thing once

Even if you never do it again. One job you’d actually want, both documents printed, two colours, mark what matches.

If it comes out at four, like mine did, that’s not a verdict on you. It means the thing you’ve been posting off to strangers has been describing a different person from the one applying. And that’s fixable-probably tonight.