You NEED to Customize Your Resume

Having a polished resume highlighting your professional attributes is job hunting 101, but Jim’s question for the WorkInSports Podcast takes it a bit further this week.

“Hey Brian, big fan of your podcast. I have a professor who is advising us to have multiple versions of our resume. I’m a junior in college. He gave us this advice, but he couldn’t explain why. I pressed him on why and he said he heard you talk about it on one of your podcasts. I would like to ask why should we have multiple copies of our resume?”

As a premium job board geared towards matchmaking between aspiring sports employees and organizations hiring them, WorkInSports Podcast host Brian Clapp naturally dives into a football reference regarding his resume writing tips. Football teams have a basic scheme for how they want to play (your base resume) and they tweak their game plans based on what they see in their upcoming opponent each week to maximize their odds for success (highlight different skills based on the job posting).

Fundamentally, you want a basic (maybe even boring) resume that won’t trip up the Applicant Tracking Systems where you apply along with a visually appealing version of your resume that you can show to a human being that will entice them to look at it.