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“Tailor your CV.”
It’s one of the most common pieces of job search advice.
It’s also one of the least useful if nobody explains what tailoring actually means.
A lot of candidates assume they need to rewrite their CV every time they apply.
Others change a few keywords, add a line from the job description and hope that’s enough.
Neither approach really gets to the point.
Tailoring your CV means making the fit easier to see.
You’re not changing your experience.
You’re deciding which parts of your experience matter most for this particular role and making sure those are the things a hiring manager sees first.
That’s especially important in EdTech.
When a hiring manager opens your CV, they’re not trying to understand every part of your career.
They’re asking a much simpler question:
Does this person make sense for this role?
They may also have dozens, or sometimes hundreds, of applications to review.
That means they don’t have time to work out how your experience might be relevant.
If the role needs someone who has managed enterprise university accounts, owned renewals and expansion, worked with SaaS products and managed senior stakeholders, that evidence needs to be clear.
If you’ve done those things but they’re buried halfway down your CV, described vaguely, or mixed with lots of less relevant information, you’re asking the hiring manager to connect the dots for you.
They might not.
The original article makes the same point: recruiters are trying to decide quickly whether someone makes sense for the role, and strong evidence can be missed if the relevance isn’t visible early enough.
Your CV should reduce the guesswork.
Give the reader enough detail, context and proof to understand why you could be a strong fit.
One of the things I see often in EdTech is people trying to keep their options open.
They might have worked across:
Customer Success.
Implementation.
Account Management.
Sales.
Partnerships.
Training.
Product feedback.
Operations.
Commercial growth.
That range can be a real strength.
But if your CV gives equal weight to everything, it can become difficult to understand where you actually fit.
A good CV isn’t a complete record of everything you can do.
It’s an argument for why you make sense for the role you’re applying for.
Imagine you work in EdTech Customer Success.
Your experience includes onboarding, renewals, training, adoption, account growth, stakeholder management and working closely with Product.
All of those things may be relevant.
But if you’re applying for a senior Customer Success role, I’d want the strongest Customer Success evidence towards the top.
Too broad:
“Experienced EdTech professional with a background in customer relationships, training, implementation and stakeholder management.”
There’s nothing wrong with it.
But it gives me very little information.
Compare it with:
Stronger:
“Managed a portfolio of university customers across onboarding, adoption, renewals and expansion, working with senior stakeholders to increase product usage and retention.”
Now I know more.
I know the customer.
I know the type of responsibility.
I understand the commercial element.
I can start to assess whether there’s alignment.
Same person.
Same experience.
Much less guesswork.
For a Sales role, a hiring manager is likely to be looking for different evidence.
They may want to understand:
Revenue generated.
Targets.
Deal size.
Sales cycle.
Customer segment.
Decision makers.
Pipeline.
Conversion.
New business versus expansion.
So:
“Built strong relationships with schools and supported business growth”
isn’t giving them enough.
A stronger version might be:
“Generated £X in new business across UK schools, managing opportunities from initial outreach through product demonstration, stakeholder engagement and close.”
Or:
“Closed enterprise deals worth £X ARR, working with senior university stakeholders across an average six month sales cycle.”
The detail matters.
The achievement you’re most proud of isn’t always the achievement that does the most work for a particular application. That’s one of the key ideas from the original article too.
The same applies to Product roles.
Perhaps your background includes customer research, usage data, roadmap input, discovery, product launches and working with Engineering.
If you’re applying for a Product role, bring that evidence forward.
Compare:
“Worked cross functionally with internal teams to improve the customer experience.”
With:
“Gathered feedback from university customers, identified recurring product needs and worked with Product and Engineering to influence roadmap priorities and improve adoption.”
The second version helps the hiring manager understand what you actually did.
It gives them evidence.
And evidence makes it easier to assess fit.
This is where many CVs fall down.
Candidates write things like:
“Managed key stakeholders.”
“Supported company growth.”
“Led strategic projects.”
“Improved customer experience.”
“Worked cross functionally.”
These statements aren’t necessarily wrong.
They’re just difficult to assess.
Which stakeholders?
What type of customers?
How large was the portfolio?
What did you own?
What was the result?
What changed because of your work?
What level of responsibility did you have?
When hiring managers are comparing several people with similar backgrounds, those details help them understand the difference between candidates.
The original framework calls this proof: showing level, scale, scope, outcomes, stakeholders, complexity and impact rather than simply listing responsibilities.
Tailoring doesn’t mean copying phrases from the job description into your CV.
It doesn’t mean stuffing it with keywords.
It doesn’t mean rewriting every bullet for every application.
And it doesn’t mean pretending you have experience you don’t have.
Good tailoring stays truthful.
You’re simply changing what the reader sees first.
Can the hiring manager quickly understand whether you’re positioning yourself for Sales, Customer Success, Product, Partnerships, Implementation or another function?
Trying to look suitable for everything can make you look clearly suited to nothing.
Look at the first third of page one.
Does it reflect what this particular company is looking for?
Your strongest evidence shouldn’t be hidden on page two.
Not every achievement deserves equal space.
Ask which examples best support this particular application and move those higher.
Avoid vague internal language.
Use specific terms when they genuinely reflect your experience.
For example:
ARR.
Pipeline.
Renewals.
Expansion.
Adoption.
Retention.
Implementation.
Onboarding.
Enterprise accounts.
SaaS.
Universities.
Schools.
MATs.
Product usage.
Sales cycle.
Customer outcomes.
Don’t make the hiring manager guess.
Include numbers where possible.
Include the type of customers you worked with.
Show the size of your responsibility.
Explain the outcome.
Give enough context for someone outside your current company to understand the value of what you did.
Before you start rewriting everything, read the job description and ask:
What are the three things this company is really hiring for?
Then look at the first third of your CV.
Can you clearly see those three things?
If not, start there.
You might need to:
• change your headline
• rewrite the first few lines of your profile
• move a relevant achievement higher
• reorder your skills
• change the first bullet under your current role
• add a number or result
• remove something that’s true but not useful for this application
You usually don’t need to rewrite the whole document. The original article makes the same recommendation: start with the job description, identify the three things the role is screening for, then check whether those things are immediately visible.
Don’t ask:
“Have I included everything?”
Ask:
“Have I made the right things obvious?”
Hiring managers are looking for alignment.
Your job is to make that alignment easy to see.
Give them enough detail.
Give them examples.
Give them evidence.
Remove the guesswork.
Your CV doesn’t need to tell your entire career story.
It needs to help someone looking at a busy shortlist understand, quickly and clearly:
Yes. This person could make sense for this role.
