Tailor your CV to any job description with ChatGPT

What you’ll get

A CV rewritten for one specific job — not a generic blast. ChatGPT extracts what the employer actually screens for, then helps you mirror that language honestly across your summary, experience and skills, so applicant tracking systems (ATS) and recruiters both find what they’re looking for.

Tools you need

• ChatGPT — free tier is enough. Have your current CV as plain text, plus the full job description.

Steps

1. Paste the job description and extract the screening keywords:

Here is a job description. Extract and categorize the most important keywords into:
technical skills, soft skills, and qualifications. List the top 15-25 terms an
applicant tracking system would prioritize.

[paste job description]

2. Expand your work experience toward the role. Paste your current experience section:

Here is my work experience. For the role above, which responsibilities and
transferable skills should I emphasize? Suggest how to reorder or reword my bullets
— without inventing anything I didn't do.

[paste your experience section]

3. Turn duties into achievements:

Rewrite these bullets as quantifiable achievements. Only use numbers that already
exist in my text or are obviously implied — do not invent metrics. Keep each bullet
under 20 words.

4. Write the headline last, when the body is strong:

Based on my tailored CV below and the job description, write 3 options for a 3-4
line professional summary that names the target role, includes 2-3 key hard skills,
and mentions 1-2 quantified outcomes.

5. Close the skills gap:

Compare my skills section against the job requirements. Which required skills am I
missing that I plausibly have but forgot to list? Which listed skills are irrelevant
to this role and safe to drop?

6. Final ATS pass:

Check my finished CV against the keyword list from step 1. Which keywords are still
missing, and where could each be integrated naturally without keyword stuffing?

7. Paste the final text into a clean, single-column CV template (Novorésumé, Canva, or a plain Google Docs template) — fancy layouts break ATS parsing.

Original source

Based on Andrei Kurtuy’s guide on the Novorésumé career blog (February 24, 2026). The prompts above follow the article’s seven-step method; the article adds template examples for each step.

Notes & variations

• The honesty rule is the whole game: tailoring means reordering and rewording real experience — never inventing skills, titles or metrics. Recruiters check.
• Re-run only steps 1, 5 and 6 for each new application once your base CV is strong — that cuts the per-application time to about 10 minutes.
• Works identically in Gemini or Claude (both have free tiers) if you’ve hit ChatGPT’s free limits.