You tailored your résumé. Don’t forget this.

When I open an application, I completely review the profile itself before I ever open a résumé. That’s true for most local government reviewers, and for many of us, it’s the only thing we need to form an initial decision.

Two things separate a profile that gets positive attention from one that doesn’t.

1. Accuracy

Job titles, dates, current employer, duties, all of it needs to reflect where you actually are right now, not where you were when you first built the profile. It’s easy to set this up once and let it sit untouched through job change after job change, but a profile with stale or inconsistent details makes a reviewer work to trust the rest of it.

2. Editing each entry for the posting in front of you

This is the one most applicants skip entirely: editing the experience described for each position so it actually speaks to the posting. Not rewriting your history, not padding it, but genuinely looking at what the posting is asking for, and describing your real experience in a way that shows the true connection. If a posting is looking for someone who’s coordinated work across departments, and you have done that, describe it directly. Don’t leave it buried in a general description that could apply to any job you’ve ever held.

What that looks like

Say Jordan’s profile includes a role where the daily reality involved coordinating logistics between several departments to keep a project moving. If the entry just reads “assisted with department operations,” a reviewer has no way to know that connection exists, even though it’s completely true. The fix isn’t inventing new experience. It’s describing the real experience using the posting’s own language, because that’s genuinely what happened and it is relevant to this particular application.

This is what I mean when I say your application profile isn’t something you finish once. It’s something you keep accurate, and something you re-edit, entry by entry, every time you apply somewhere new.

Keep going

The Master Profile Strategy guide walks through exactly how to keep your profile accurate and build one strong version you know how to adjust honestly for each posting. It’s part of our resource library, same as the résumé guide.

Insider tip: The goal isn’t to make your experience sound like something it wasn’t. It’s to make sure the truth of it is actually visible to the person deciding whether to interview you.

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