Read the posting like a brief

Most people read a job posting once, decide "I could do that", and start editing their CV. That is the whole mistake. A posting is a brief, and briefs have a structure worth extracting before you write anything.

You need a real one open for this. Pick a role you would genuinely take — not a stretch fantasy, not a safety net. The rest of the module builds on it.

The five things worth extracting

Every posting, under the noise, is telling you:

1. The job title they will search for. Often different from the headline. "Growth Marketer" in the title, "demand generation" everywhere in the body.
2. Must-haves versus nice-to-haves. Usually mixed together on purpose. A must-have repeats, or carries a number, or appears in the first three bullets.
3. The vocabulary. Their words for the tools, the metrics, the team. This is what goes in the search box.
4. The problem they are hiring to solve. Almost every posting leaks it. "Support our first enterprise customers" is a different job from "scale an existing enterprise motion".
5. The knockouts. Authorisation, location, a licence, a named certification, a hard year count.

Run this

Paste the whole posting, including the boilerplate. The parts people skip often carry the knockouts.

Here is a job posting. Read it as a brief and give me:
 
1. The exact job title a recruiter would search for, and any alternative titles used in the body.
2. Must-haves vs nice-to-haves, in two lists. Put anything ambiguous in must-haves and mark it "unclear".
3. The 10 exact words or phrases they use that I should mirror. Their spelling, their casing.
4. The problem this role exists to solve, in one sentence, quoted from the text if possible.
5. Any knockout criteria: authorisation, location, licences, hard year counts.
 
Quote the posting for each point. If something is not stated, say "not stated" rather than guessing.
 
POSTING:
[paste here]

The "quote it or say not stated" instruction is doing real work. Without it, models fill gaps with what a role like this usually wants, and you end up tailoring to a posting that does not exist.

Read the must-haves honestly

Now the uncomfortable part. Go down the must-have list and mark each one: have it, partial, do not have it.

Partial is the interesting column. That is where tailoring earns its keep — you have adjacent evidence and just have not been framing it in their language. "Do not have it" on two or three must-haves is normal and worth applying anyway. On most of them, spend the hour on a better-matched role instead.

Keep this output. Module 3 turns it into a tracker, and module 5 turns the must-haves into interview questions you can rehearse.

Next: turning that brief into a CV tailored to this one role.