The general-purpose résumé you still need

I've spent months telling people to tailor. Every application, every posting, match the document to the target. So it's a little awkward to admit that one of the documents I care most about in jobhunt.coach is the one that deliberately isn't tailored to anything.

Tailoring is still the right default when you're applying somewhere specific. The tailoring post covers why, and what has to be true underneath for it to stay honest. That advice stands.

But a real job search is full of moments with no target. A recruiter messages you and asks for "your résumé," singular, before there's any particular role on the table. A friend offers to forward you internally and needs something today. A job board wants a profile upload. Someone at a conference asks what you do and you'd rather send a document than a paragraph. In every one of those moments there is no job description to tailor to, and there may not be one for weeks.

What most people do is grab the last tailored résumé they generated and send that. Which means a recruiter looking for a generalist gets a document quietly bent toward one specific company's stack, one team's vocabulary, one posting's emphasis. It reads oddly and nobody can quite say why.

In jobhunt.coach, general-use generation has an explicit profile-only request. It receives your composed profile without a target company, role, fit analysis, or posting. Your saved or selected style controls the presentation. That separation gives the model a clear instruction: build a broadly useful baseline from the experience you have recorded, without guessing which job it is for.

Why be strict about that? Because the two documents make different assumptions about who's reading. A tailored résumé assumes a reader who already speaks the posting's language, so the instruction is to use the JD's terminology only where your profile supports it. The general résumé has no target job to mirror. Its LaTeX instructions explicitly ask for broadly understood terminology; its HTML instructions ask for a general-use baseline from the profile. Both carry the rules against inventing facts or strengthening claims. If your record says you ran a proof of concept, the document needs to preserve that limit. Read the result to make sure it did.

The general-use résumé can be rendered through HTML or LaTeX. Both produce a PDF to download; the choice describes how the page is built.

We also keep it labeled. The result shows up as "General-use résumé," versioned on its own, not filed under any application. That sounds like bookkeeping, and mostly it is, but it encodes the point: the general résumé is its own document with its own rules, and nothing about it pretends to be tailored. When a posting does arrive, you tailor for it properly rather than touching up the general one.

A general résumé may leave out language that matters to a particular posting. That is a reason to review it against a real job description when one arrives, rather than assume a broadly useful document is already the best version for that application.

The counterargument has some force: if you were fast enough, you could tailor for everything, even the recruiter's vague ask. In practice you can't, because half these moments come with no target to tailor to and a deadline of "now." Guessing at an imaginary JD and tailoring to that is worse than not tailoring at all; you've taken on tailoring's risks with none of its information.

So, this week: make sure a general version of your résumé exists, whether jobhunt.coach generates it or you write it yourself. Check that it's current, that it reads cleanly to someone outside your last company, and that every claim in it is one you'd defend in an interview with no posting to hide behind. Then put it where you can find it in under a minute. The next time someone asks for your résumé with no role attached, you'll send the document built for exactly that question, and save the tailoring for when there's something real to tailor to.