Resume Prompts for Claude: 7 Templates That Don't Invent

The best resume prompts for Claude do three things: give it your real resume, give it the full job post, and tell it what it is not allowed to invent. Paste the templates below, fill in the brackets, and you will get tailored bullets you can actually send.

Claude tends to follow explicit constraints well, which is useful here. Its main failure mode on resumes is not bad writing. It is polishing a bullet until it claims something you never did. Most of the prompts below are built to prevent that.

Set up Claude once with a resume system prompt

Start with a system prompt or a Project instruction, so you do not repeat the rules in every chat. In Claude, a Project's custom instructions work well for this. If you use the API, put it in the system field. The rules stay the same either way.

You are a resume editor helping me apply for jobs. Follow these rules in every reply:

1. Use only facts that appear in my resume or that I state in this chat. Never invent employers, titles, dates, tools, metrics or outcomes.
2. If a bullet would be stronger with a number I did not give you, ask me for it. Do not guess one.
3. Write bullets that start with a strong past-tense verb (present tense for my current role), show what I did, and end with the result when I have one.
4. Keep each bullet to one or two lines. No filler adjectives such as "passionate", "dynamic" or "results-driven".
5. Mirror the job post's wording only where it is truthful for me. Do not copy whole phrases.
6. When you are unsure whether something is true about me, flag it in a section called "Check with me" at the end of your reply.

Rule 2 does the most work. Without it, Claude will happily write "increased onboarding completion by 30%" because it sounds right. With it, you get a question back, which is what you want.

What the rules change in practice

Take the input "Managed a team of support agents" and the request "make this stronger". With no rules, you will typically get something like "Led a high-performing team of support agents, boosting customer satisfaction and reducing response times." Every claim after the first four words is made up.

With the system prompt above, the reply is a question: how many agents, what changed while you managed them, and do you have a figure for it? That small friction is the whole point. You spend thirty seconds answering, and the bullet ends up true.

One caveat. System prompts reduce invention, they do not remove it. Behaviour differs between Claude models and versions, so run your first tailoring pass and read the output before you trust the setup.

Prepare your master resume before you prompt

Claude can only tailor what it can see. If your resume is a tight one-page PDF, you have already thrown away the detail that makes tailoring work, like team size, tools, and what happened afterwards.

Keep a master version in plain text. Under each role, add a short block of raw facts, even if they never make it onto the final resume. Something like this:

Role: [job title], [company], [start year] to [end year]
Team size and who I reported to: [details]
Tools I used daily: [list]
Things I owned: [list]
Results I remember, with numbers where I have them: [list]
Things I am not sure I can claim: [list]

The last line is useful. It gives Claude a boundary and gives you a record of what to verify before an interview. Paste the whole master into the prompts below, and let Claude choose what to cut.

Tailor your resume to a specific job post

This is the prompt most people search for, and it is where the gains are. A generic resume sent to fifty roles loses to a resume that reads like it was written for one.

Template 1: Tailor a resume to a job post

Here is my current resume:

<resume>
[paste resume text]
</resume>

Here is the job post:

<job_post>
[paste full job description]
</job_post>

Task: tailor my resume for this role.

Step 1. List the 6-8 requirements that matter most in the job post, in order of importance. Quote the wording from the post.
Step 2. For each requirement, tell me which part of my resume supports it, or say "no match" if nothing does.
Step 3. Rewrite my summary and the bullets for [most relevant role] to put the best matches first. Do not add anything that is not in my resume.
Step 4. Under "Check with me", list any gaps and any bullet where a number or detail would help.

Return the rewritten sections only, not the whole resume.

The XML-style tags are there because Claude handles clearly separated inputs well, and they stop the job post from blending into your resume. Step 2 is the useful part. Seeing "no match" next to a requirement tells you whether to apply at all, or what to address in a cover letter.

Asking for the requirements first also makes Claude commit to a reading of the job post before it starts writing. If it ranks the wrong thing first, you can correct it in one line and rerun step 3, instead of untangling a finished rewrite.

A worked example

Say your resume has this bullet for a customer support role:

Handled customer tickets and helped improve the help centre.

The job post is for a Support Operations Specialist and asks for "documentation ownership" and "reducing repeat contacts". You run Template 1. Claude's step 2 says the help centre line partly matches both requirements but has no detail. In "Check with me" it asks: how many articles did you write or rewrite, and did repeat tickets on those topics change?

You reply: 40 articles rewritten, and tickets on password resets dropped noticeably, though you never tracked the exact number. The rewrite:

Rewrote 40 help centre articles, including the password reset flow, which cut repeat tickets on that topic.

Notice what it did not do. It did not invent a percentage. You can add one later if you find the real figure. The bullet is now specific, tied to the job post, and defensible in an interview.

Rewrite weak bullets without adding fiction

Most resumes have five or six bullets that describe duties, not work. A bullet like "Responsible for weekly reports" tells a recruiter nothing about whether anyone read them.

Template 2: Turn duties into achievements

Rewrite the bullets below so each one shows what I did and what changed because of it. Use only the facts I give you.

My role: [job title] at [company type, e.g. a 50-person SaaS company]

Bullets:
[paste bullets]

For each bullet:
- Give one rewritten version.
- If the result is missing, ask me one specific question about it instead of guessing.

Format: a numbered list matching my bullets, with questions in italics after each rewrite.

Answer the questions in the same chat and ask Claude to produce the final versions. Two rounds is usually enough. A third round tends to produce flourish, not substance.

Template 3: Cut a bullet to one line

Shorten each bullet to a single line of no more than [20] words. Keep the verb, the scope and the result. Remove anything vague.

[paste bullets]

Use this after the tailoring pass, since tailoring usually makes bullets longer.

Short follow-ups that fix most problems

You rarely need a new template when the first answer is close. These one-liners cover the common fixes. Send them as replies in the same chat:

That bullet says "led" but I only contributed. Rewrite it to say what I actually did: [describe your part].

Too many bullets start with the same verb. Vary the openings without changing any facts.

Remove every claim in your last reply that is not stated in my resume or in this chat, and list what you removed.

The last one is a good audit. If Claude removes nothing, you can relax a little. If it lists three items, you just caught three problems.

Check keywords and gaps before you apply

Applicant tracking systems vary, and nobody outside the vendors knows exactly how each one ranks. Treat keyword matching as a sanity check, not a game to win. A human still reads the resume after any filter.

Template 4: Keyword and gap check

Compare my resume with the job post.

<resume>
[paste resume]
</resume>

<job_post>
[paste job description]
</job_post>

Give me:
1. Skills and tools named in the job post that appear in my resume (use the exact wording from the post).
2. Skills and tools named in the job post that do NOT appear in my resume.
3. For each item in list 2, say whether I likely have the experience under different wording (point to the line) or whether it is a real gap.

Do not suggest adding anything I have not done.

List 3 stops you from stuffing in keywords you cannot back up. If you wrote "managed Salesforce records" and the post says "CRM administration", that is a wording change. If you have never touched the tool, it is a gap, and you should say so honestly in your application.

Write the summary, cover letter and interview prep from the same inputs

Once Claude has your resume and the job post in the chat, reuse them. The next three templates assume both are already pasted above.

Template 5: Professional summary

Write three versions of a 2-3 sentence professional summary for the [job title] role at [company]. Base it only on my resume and the job post above.

Version A: lead with years and domain of experience.
Version B: lead with my strongest measurable result.
Version C: lead with the problem this role exists to solve.

No adjectives like "passionate" or "driven".

Pick one and edit it. Three options beat one because you can see which angle sounds like you.

Template 6: Short cover letter

Write a cover letter of under [250] words for the [job title] role at [company]. Use my resume and the job post above.

Structure: one sentence on why this role, one paragraph on my two most relevant achievements with detail, one short paragraph on what I would do in the first [90] days, one-line close.

Tone: [direct and warm]. Do not repeat my resume line by line. Do not invent facts about the company; if you need something about them, leave a [bracketed placeholder] for me to fill in.

The placeholder instruction matters. Claude has no way of knowing your target company's recent news unless you supply it, and a made-up detail in a cover letter is worse than none. Fill the gaps yourself from the company's own site, then ask Claude to smooth the sentence.

Template 7: Interview questions from your resume

Based on my resume and the job post above, list the 8 questions an interviewer is most likely to ask me, focusing on the weakest or vaguest parts of my resume. For each, give a one-line note on what a strong answer should include, using only my real experience. Mark any question where I have no relevant experience, so I can prepare an honest answer.

This often exposes a bullet you cannot explain. Better to find that out in your kitchen than in the interview.

Habits that make these prompts work better

• Paste text, not screenshots of a formatted PDF. Tables and columns in PDFs can come through scrambled. Copy the text from your source document.

• Keep one master resume. Tailor from the full version that lists everything, then cut. Tailoring from an already trimmed version loses material.

• Start a new chat per job. Details from one application leak into the next if you reuse a conversation.

• Read every line before sending. Claude can still slip in a subtle exaggeration, such as "led" when you "contributed to". You are the final check.

• Compare outputs if you use more than one model. Results differ by model and by version, so test a template on your own resume before trusting it. Our guide on getting consistent results across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini covers how to adapt a prompt between them.

Save the templates so you do not rebuild them each time

A job search means running the same prompts dozens of times with different job posts. Keeping them in a notes file works until you tweak one and lose the earlier version. Saving them in a prompt library lets you keep the system prompt and the seven templates together, edit them, and reuse them with a few clicks.

If you adjust Template 1 after a bad result, prompt version control lets you go back to the version that worked. That matters more than it sounds. Resume prompts get tweaked a lot in the first week, and it is easy to make one worse without noticing.

Next step

Copy the system prompt and Template 1 into your own workspace, run them on one real job post, and keep whichever version produces bullets you would be comfortable defending. Browse the public prompt library for more role-based templates to build on.