The Ultimate Guide to Job Ads Tailoring: High Pay Job Part 4

Look at you! You’ve settled on the job title(s) you want to go after and have a plan for getting them. You’ve optimized your LinkedIn profile to attract recruiters like flies to honey. You might even now be chatting with many a recruiter on your next career moves! If that’s the case for you, massive kudos to you. You might not strictly need to go the job ads tailoring route, you in-demand beast.

If that’s not the case, however, then it’s time to implement Step 4 of How to Get a High-Paying Job. This is a deeper dive into exactly how to hack your resume and optimize LinkedIn. If you’ve already flipped the switch that tells recruiters you’re available, what’s left now is to lure them your way. You’re going to do that by picking out ads for jobs you want to have. Next, you’ll go through each ad and highlight the phrasing that best sums up the job responsibilities. Finally, you’ll weave that verbiage into your own experience descriptions.

There is a time commitment to this, but no more than an hour to source the job ads and attack them with a highlighter for tailoring. What you don’t need to do at this stage is go through the application process. Filling out job applications is a frustrating, time-consuming endeavor that doesn’t guarantee much rate of return. What we want to do is bring recruiters to us instead; that way you’ll get into the interview funnel by working smart, not hard.

Why Wouldn’t I Directly Apply to These Jobs?

This isn’t a knock to the folks grinding out job applications every day of the week. It’s an issue I have with the overall job application systems we have in place. There is next to no progress on the online application process of:

1. Find a job ad you want to apply to
2. Go to company page and attach your resume
3. Go through the time-consuming fields where you must type in all the information already in your attached resume
4. Occasionally forced to create an account in the company job portal
5. Once completed, there’s a 90% chance you’ll never hear from this company again

This BS is so rampant that it’s everywhere, from the minimum wage retail work to flashy six figure positions. In my experience there’s nothing more demoralizing or dehumanizing about the job process than this, especially being forced to wait on a response that often never comes. You’ll get a “thanks for submitting your application!” email, and then… radio silence. Forever.

I really hate that and have done everything in my power to find a new way of getting jobs without going through that process. Steps 1-3 cover the basics of my strategy that’s landed me new roles at $60,000 and $90,000 once I really got going. That first $60k role was a 50% pay increase from my prior role’s starting pay at $15 an hour, so I know anecdotally this is the best approach. What you need to do to draw recruiters to you is to know how to sell yourself to the types of roles you want. And you do that by tailoring your resume and LinkedIn profile to what the job needs.

Here’s Exactly How to Tailor Your Resume With Job Ads Tailoring

A couple of months ago I coached an awesome WWG reader, Diego, through job ads tailoring his resume and LinkedIn profile. He has a sales background and is looking to break into entry-level marketing as his next career move. To get started I had him look up 3-6 job ads for roles he’d like to take on; I talk more on finding exactly which job titles to target in Step 1.

You’re going to take the job titles you’re targeting and plug ‘em into the LinkedIn, Google Jobs, and Indeed search bars. Certain places around the country have city-specific sites if you want to work for more niche places (Boston’s got VentureFizz and Built in Boston, for example) so it’s worth poking around online for more local online job boards.

Once you have your job ads in hand it’s time to grab that highlighter and robbing them of their own words. That job description? That’s your new guideline for everything the hiring manager wants. Here are the three job ads Diego and I used for this step:

We’re looking at these ads to pick out the specific phrases and verbiage they use. There are two big reasons we want to do this:

1. They’ll speak the most to hiring managers, and
2. They’ll speak to the software algorithms recruiters and HR use to filter applicants.

Either way, using the exact phrasing the hiring managers themselves use means you’re a shoe-in for the hiring funnel – no formal application needed.

Here you’re looking for sentences in the job description that you can attribute to your own past/current roles. In Diego’s case, we found some great bullet points that can describe his past sales roles so he’ll appear in results for these marketing roles. Using the three job ads above here’s the phrases Diego and I ended up with.

JOB 1 (GE Power Portfolio)

• Activate and enable their sales activities
• Develop customer communications engagement that supports the business growth
• Support lead generation through customer campaigns
• Provide direction, content, and topics for internal and external storytelling
• develop communications plan aligned with business priorities

(Note: The wording of this makes it clear to me the person who wrote this likely learned English as a second language. If they’re a Spanish speaker this could give you a leg up in the hiring process!)

JOB 2 (Francesca’s)

• Drive profitable revenue growth across paid and performance channels
• Focus on business-level KPIs and marketing performance
• Monitor data integrations and flows of customer records within database
• Identify areas for efficiency and performance improvement
• Work cross-functionally across the organization

JOB 3 (Stryker Associates)

• Execute brand strategies and identify new opportunities for assigned products, product lines, lines of business
• Brand-level development including market analysis, product acquisitions, and brand management
• Establish product branding and messaging
• Leveraging consumer insight and market research
• Provides sales support to account managers
• Provide input on new product development.
• Provide sales force with competitive and technical data on a timely basis.
• Assist with digital channel content development

(Note: I like how this job ad puts “excellent analytical and negotiation skills” as a minimum qualification… that’s a great green light for negotiating a better salary down the line!)

Does This Work for All Career Changes?

Now there are some folks out there who are looking to pivot into completely different career roles. Making the jump from sales to marketing is easier than most since there’s some good overlap between the two. The job ads tailoring you’d have to do for similar roles is as straightforward as it’s gonna get. But what if you wanted to enter a field where you have NO relevant experience to back it up?

New graduates in particular fret over this when they’re competing against established professionals for the jobs they want. Same goes for folks who’ve worked in the same role/career for years and now realize they’re desperate to GTFO. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, it is very much possible to change careers while still using this method, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s an easy overlap between the two. It’s not going to be as straightforward or easy to make the switch, but it’s at least doable.

I’ve heard some sound advice from others to gain relevant experience in other ways, like taking a community college course or a freelancing gig. If you can swing either, neither can hurt and will give you a chance to easily use the tailoring technique above. I’d recommend taking some of the verbiage and seeing if you can spin it just a little to fit with what your experience is.

To show you what I mean, let’s look again at the phrases from Job Ad #1.

JOB 1 (GE Power Portfolio)

• Activate and enable their sales activities
• Develop customer communications engagement that supports the business growth
• Support lead generation through customer campaigns
• Provide direction, content, and topics for internal and external storytelling
• develop communications plan aligned with business priorities

No matter what your job is, you have to interact with other people at some point, which includes your boss at minimum. Your interactions with others on a professional level can be described with a majority of the above phrases, tweaking as necessary. Maybe you put “business activities” instead of “sales activities” for that first line. Hey, that third line could say “customer support” instead of “customer campaigns” if the shoe fits. And bit by bit, your newly tailored resume/profile will come to life.

I mentioned this in my ChooseFI interview last year, with cohost Brad calling this “the secrets to life”. And it really is a type of cheat code to giving the hiring managers EXACTLY what they’re looking for. You are, after all, a professional who will get the job done while being a delight to work with. Let’s get your stuff so custom tailored that recruiters can’t help but reach out to help you get that high-paying job.

Cover image credit: Anton Maksimov via Unsplash