cv-tailor

CV Tailor

Compile the career-evidence referential into a document aimed at one reader. The referential is the source and is never edited from here: a fact missing at compile time is a fact to capture upstream, not to invent downstream.

1. Classify before writing

Never produce a document before these four are settled. They decide length, structure, vocabulary and what may be named. Ask only for what cannot be read from the request.

	Values	Decides
Reader	intermediary (recruiter, ESN sales, RH) · technical decision-maker (CTO, tech lead) · training buyer	vocabulary, what leads
Artifact	2-page CV · dossier de compétences · per-posting variant	structure and length
Channel	ATS form · direct email · freelance platform · ESN	parsing constraints, anonymisation
Target	the role aimed at, in the market's own words	title, ordering, keyword set

The reader is the axis most often collapsed. On the French market a large share of inbound goes through intermediaries who filter on vocabulary without reading the technology. The same evidence therefore compiles differently: a technical decision-maker wants the problem and the architecture, an intermediary wants the role title, the stack and the availability.

2. Two artifacts, one source

These are different documents, not two lengths of the same one. Producing a compromise between them is the most common failure and it serves neither reader.

The CV — two pages, never three. Beyond ten years of experience one page under-delivers, and past two pages a measurable share of recruiters reject on sight. Detail the last five to seven years; condense everything before into a single dense block. Structure: identity → headline and summary → key skills → selected engagements → earlier career → training and certifications.

The dossier de compétences — long, mission by mission. The format French intermediaries expect, and the one they can re-skin. Roughly half the volume goes to engagements, each opening with client context before its outcomes. Detail on the last five to seven years, micro-engagements grouped rather than listed one by one. See references/dossier-competences.md.

Cutting an eleven-page dossier down to two pages destroys the artifact intermediaries actually read. Compile both from the same referential instead.

3. Aggregate what is repetitive, detail what is singular

Engagements are the reason someone reads the document, so they carry the detail. Recurring activity is proved by its totals, not by its list: twenty-five training sessions become four lines, seven audits become three. The referential keeps every entry so the totals stay recomputable.

Aggregate training by course rather than by year — a reader wants to know what can be taught, and a chronological cut exposes gaps that need a sentence rather than a table. Prefer participant counts over session counts when a course was delivered to large cohorts, and state the totals so nothing looks concealed.

Where a course or an offering is no longer sold, keep it in a separate line rather than folding it into the headline figure.

4. Disclosure is enforced, not advised

Before emitting any client name, read its disclosure in the referential.

• public → the name may appear.
• sector-only → emit ## Formulation publique verbatim. Never the name, never the product, never the acronym, never a domain narrow enough to identify the buyer.
• excluded → the engagement contributes to totals, seniority and date continuity, and to nothing else.

If a restricted entry has no ## Formulation publique, stop and say so. Do not sanitise on the fly: judging what identifies a buyer in a narrow market is the person's call, made once, upstream.

5. Bullets

One formula, applied everywhere: verb, then object with the technology named, then a figure or a scope, on the same line. The reader scans line starts, so the verb comes first and the figure never spills to the next line.

Where no figure exists, state the scope instead of inventing an outcome, and make the challenge explicit so the bullet still carries weight. Two lines is the right density; one is thin, three is the ceiling.

Every technology listed in the skills section must appear in at least one engagement bullet. A skill listed and never demonstrated is what reviewers call inflated duties, and it is one of the markers they read as machine-written. See references/bullet-formulas.md.

6. Keyword coverage is a floor

Extract the posting's vocabulary, classify each term as covered, partial, gap or not-applicable, and place what is missing where the corresponding filter reads it. Target roughly three quarters coverage and stop there.

Full coverage is a defect, not a goal. It means terms were claimed without evidence, and reviewers name keyword saturation as the first thing that makes a document read as generated. Write the acronym and its expansion once each. Never append a keyword block at the end of the document: it ties no term to a dated engagement and reads as stuffing.

On form-based channels, fill the skills and languages fields by hand. At least one major ATS never populates them from the uploaded file, so the filters a recruiter uses stay empty however good the document is.

7. Gate before delivery

Run these in order. The first three are mechanical and must pass.

1. Plain-text extraction. Extract the text from the produced file and read it. That is what a parser sees. Wrong order, merged columns or words that lost letters mean the file is broken whatever it looks like on screen. Watch the fi ff fl ligatures in French: certification, profil, efficacité, qualifications.
2. Parsing rules. Single column, no tables, no text boxes, nothing in headers or footers, contact details in the body, standard section headings, one date format, text-layer file under 2.5 MB. Full list with sources: references/ats-rules-fr.md.
3. Disclosure. No restricted name anywhere in the output.
4. Dates. No unexplained overlap, no unexplained gap, and consistency with the LinkedIn profile — recruiters check both.
5. Human pass. Read it aloud. Every verb should be one the person would actually say. Vary bullet length deliberately; uniform rhythm is a tell.

Do not compute or report an ATS score. No major vendor produces one a candidate could aim at — scores come from the tools that sell them. Report findings, not a grade.

8. Deliver with its diff

Ship the document plus what changed and why, section by section, one line per change. The person accepts or rejects each one. A document rewritten in one block cannot be reviewed, only trusted.

State explicitly what was left out and why: entries dropped for relevance, figures missing upstream, sections aggregated. Silent truncation reads as full coverage.

Anti-patterns

• Compromising between the CV and the dossier. Two readers, two artifacts.
• Reporting a score. It measures the tool that computed it.
• Sanitising a restricted client on the fly instead of stopping when the public formulation is missing.
• Maximising keyword coverage. Past the floor it is the marker reviewers reject on.
• Editing the referential from here. Missing facts go upstream.
• Reordering engagements out of chronology to put a relevant one first. Parsers and readers both infer recency from position; move the bullets, not the entries.
• Reducing legibility to hit a page count. A clean two pages beats a cramped one.