tailor-resume

tailor-resume

Turn the master profile into a resume aimed at one job — maximizing relevance and ATS keyword match without inventing anything.

Inputs

1. Profile: read profile/master-profile.md (frontmatter + body, plus any [VERIFY] flags — don't rely on unverified facts). If missing → /build-profile.
2. Job: pasted description, URL, or an entry from jobs/found-<date>.json. Known-info gate (RULES §6): if no job is given inline, read jobs/current.json — do not re-ask for the JD when score-fit/find-jobs already captured it.
3. (Optional) scores/<job-id>.score.json from score-fit — reuse its missing_keywords list.

The one hard rule

Never fabricate. You may select, reorder, reframe, and re-emphasize the user's real experience and use the job's vocabulary for things they actually did. You may not invent roles, titles, dates, metrics, skills, or tools they don't have. If a must-have is genuinely absent, leave it out and flag it to the user — don't paper over it.

Read but never quote: the context block

The profile has a context: block with career_goal and additional_info. Read both for signal — use them to bias which experience strand to lead with in the Summary and which skills to elevate. Never quote, paraphrase, or echo their contents into the Summary, bullets, or anywhere else the candidate would send out. Do not write phrases like "My career goal is…" — that signal stays internal.

Method

0. Load region conventions. Read the target region's pack in ../../knowledge/regions/ and follow its resume rules — length, what to include/omit (e.g., US: omit photo/DOB, no salary; IN: 1–2 pages, include notice period, drop photo/DOB by default), spelling variant, and date format. These govern the structure below.
1. Read the job for must-have keywords, responsibilities, seniority, and the language it uses.
2. Select & order the profile's most relevant experience, skills, and projects for this role; drop or shorten the irrelevant. Use context.career_goal as a tie-breaker on what to lead with.
3. Rewrite bullets under the rubric below.
4. Surface keywords naturally into summary/skills/bullets — enough to pass ATS screening, never keyword-stuffed.
5. Honor constraints/voice from the profile Notes (tone, hard limits).
6. Self-check the draft against the rubric and anti-patterns before writing.

Bullet & section rubric (self-check before writing)

1. One page if <10 yrs, two pages max (defer to region pack). If the draft exceeds, trim oldest-irrelevant bullets first, then longest bullets — never delete a whole role.
2. Bullet shape: Verb + What + Measurable impact (or scoped scale). Strong past-tense verb at start; metric at end. Choose the opening verb from reference/action-verbs.md (Harvard list), matched to the kind of work (build / improve / lead / analyze / create).
3. No first-person pronouns (I, my, we). Implied subject only.
4. Banned filler verbs: helped, assisted, worked on, was involved in, responsible for, participated in, contributed to. Replace with the actual action or cut.
5. Parallel grammar in a list: same tense across all bullets in a role (past for past roles; pick past or present for current and stick).
6. No buzzword-only bullets: synergized, leveraged, utilized, spearheaded without a quantified outcome → rewrite or cut. Leveraged → used.
7. Each role: 3–6 bullets (up to 8 for the most recent/most-relevant role), most-relevant-to-target first.
8. ≥60% of bullets must contain a number (count / percent / time / money / scale). If less, prompt the user for missing metrics before writing — never invent.
9. Keyword surfacing is integrated, not appended: a JD skill enters Summary + Skills + ≥1 truthful bullet. No bullet exists solely to namedrop.
10. Default section order: Name+Contact → Summary (≤3 lines) → Experience → Skills → Education → Projects (if relevant) → Achievements (only if load-bearing). Region pack may override.
11. Summary is ≤3 lines, ≤55 words. Pattern: [Role identity w/ target keywords]. [Two flagship achievements w/ metrics]. [What you bring to <target-role-type>]. Never name the target company.
12. Skills grouped, not flat: 3–5 named groups (per track preset); 4–8 items per group; ordered most-relevant first.
13. Dates obey region pack (US: Mon YYYY or Mon YYYY – Present; IN: DD/MM/YYYY or Mon YYYY). Consistent across all roles.
14. Vary verbs across the whole page — no two consecutive bullets start with the same verb, and avoid reusing any verb more than twice (scannability + perceived breadth). Pull from the full action-verbs.md range rather than recycling led/managed/built.
15. Honor context.career_goal and Notes / voice: bias Summary toward stated goal direction; respect declared tone; never override hard constraints.

Anti-patterns (do not ship)

• The duties list — job-description-as-resume.
• "We did this" plural where the candidate's individual contribution is unclear.
• Smart quotes / em-dashes in the markdown (rendercv/Typst render Unicode fine, but keep the source clean and consistent).
• Skills-section keyword spam (>10 per group, generic "Microsoft Office, Excel" for senior roles).
• Tools-without-outcomes ("Used Jira, Figma, Notion" as a bullet).
• Naming the target company in Summary ("Excited to join Stripe to…").

Output — produce the PDF by default

Write the resume content, then render it. Default output is a sendable PDF, not just markdown.

1. Write the content files to resumes/

• resumes/<company>-<role-slug>.md — human-readable tailored markdown for review (sections per rule 10).
• resumes/<company>-<role-slug>.tailor.json — structured sidecar:

  {
    "source_profile_path": "profile/master-profile.md",
    "target_job": { "company": "...", "role": "...", "url": "..." },
    "theme_hint": "engineeringresumes | classic | sb2nov | moderncv | ...",  // optional rendercv theme
    "contact_order": ["email","phone","linkedin","github","portfolio"],
    "contact_hidden": ["twitter"],                      // optional, per-job
    "basics_overrides": { "label": "<role-targeted subtitle>", "summary": "<tailored summary>" },
    "content": { "work": [ ... ], "skills": [ ... ], "projects": [ ... ], "education": [ ... ] }
  }
  

• resumes/<company>-<role-slug>.json — the JSON-Resume intermediate render-resume consumes. Assemble it from the profile + the tailored content (see ../render-resume/reference/json-resume-schema.md):
  • basics: name, label/summary from basics_overrides, email, phone, location, and profiles[] = every link in the master profile's links: block ({network, url}, including links.other) so no link is lost; portfolio → basics.url.
  • work / skills / projects / education from content (tailored).
  • meta: { track, region, paper, theme } (theme = theme_hint or engineeringresumes).
  • Never re-derive links by parsing the markdown — read them from links:.

2. Render the PDF (default) + visual QA

Preflight first (so the dependency isn't a surprise mid-flow): run python3 scripts/doctor.py. If it reports rendercv MISSING, tell the user up front before rendering — "the PDF needs rendercv (one-time install): python3 -m venv skills/render-resume/.venv && skills/render-resume/.venv/bin/pip install \"rendercv[full]\" — install now, or I'll hand you the markdown + content files and you render later?" — and only pip install on their go-ahead. With rendercv present, render:

python3 skills/render-resume/scripts/render.py --data resumes/<slug>.json --out resumes/<slug>.pdf [--theme <theme>]

(render.py auto-runs the deterministic page/fill QA gate and prints an ATS-safe: yes/no line — relay the warning if a styled theme was used.) Then run the review-render vision-QA loop on the PDF (render → screenshot → rubric → one fix → re-render, bounded) — the resume isn't "done" until it passes. If rendercv isn't installed, render.py writes the .rendercv.yaml and prints install guidance (exit 0) — tell the user to install it (README) or run /render-resume once set up; the content files are still produced.

3. Report

• A 2–4 line rationale: what you emphasized, what you cut, which keywords you added.
• Any honesty flags: must-haves the user genuinely lacks.
• Any rubric / QA warnings and the PDF path.

Next steps

Resume PDF ready (resumes/<slug>.pdf). Next: /write-cover-letter for this job, then submit — or /apply-to-job to assemble the cover letter + form answers in one pass. No emoji.