A poll: Customised CV for every job or spray and pray

Bubble, bubble
1

It’s 2026. You want a job. You’ve already applied for 10 jobs you thought you were perfect for and the response has been nothing at all. You need to switch up your strategy. Do you

  • Spray and pray: Go fully automated industrial, send identical CVs to 1,000 jobs
  • Craft specialist CVs for every vacancy. Tell yourself it’s their loss if they don’t appreciate
  • Spray the bad jobs. Craft the good ones
  • Give up. Downsize. Default.
0 voters
2

Full spray is the only option, I am told

1 Like
3

Really? I’ve heard that a simple ten minute tailoring from GPT can make any CV infinitely more likely to convert

1 Like
4

I haven’t applied to a new job in a while (aside from flirting with some recruiters) but in today’s day and age it seems that at least mild tailoring is a catastrophically bad idea

5

It would be helpful for all of us here if you can describe the process of flirting with recruiters please

6

I’m not going to teach you how to flirt, Jobbly

7

If you are not tailoring every single CV to every single application, you are actively losing out on opportunities. A phenomenally bad idea

1 Like
8

Apply to all potential job Titles which you have the skillset for , of-course with customised CV for each. best would be to automate it. Then Pray. Spraying is no tactical approach.

9

Depends how desperate you are. It’s always worth crafting a well thought out CV and cover letter for jobs that you’re truly interested in, but if you’re just playing the field while in a comfortable role then you can probably just use a general purpose one and put some effort in if they show some interest.

If you’re not working then there’s no excuse not to be customizing every CV