Most UX/UI designers polish the portfolio and send the same CV to 50 jobs — but the ATS scores the CV, not the portfolio, and it decides whether a human ever clicks your link. It ranks you against that one job description: its process, tools and deliverables. A CV that lists "creative, Figma, user-centred design" loses to one that mirrors the offer's "usability testing, design system components, developer handoff, WCAG accessibility". This page shows how to tailor your existing designer CV to a specific offer — without inventing anything you can't defend in the interview.
How an ATS reads a UX/UI designer CV
Before a human sees it, your CV is parsed and scored. The ATS extracts skills, titles and years, then matches them against the job description. The closer your wording is to the offer, the higher you rank. Two rules follow: (1) use the offer's exact terms ("usability testing", not "validating designs"; "design system", not "component library" — or vice versa, whichever the posting says), and (2) keep the layout machine-readable — which for designers means resisting the two-column, icon-heavy CV. A beautiful CV the parser can't read scores zero.
How to tailor your designer CV to the job offer
Tailoring is not rewriting your whole CV per job. It is re-ordering and re-phrasing what is already true so the offer's priorities surface first:
- Read the UX–UI balance. A research-heavy offer rewards interviews, usability tests and information architecture; a UI-heavy offer rewards visual craft, design systems and motion. Lead with the side the posting weights.
- Mirror the process stages they name. Discovery, wireframes, prototypes, handoff — describe your real projects in the offer's own stage names.
- Match the collaboration model. "Embedded in a product squad", "working with PMs and engineers", "design critiques" — use their phrasing for the ways of working you have actually practised.
Paste the job link, upload your CV, and MaxCV does exactly this in ~30 seconds — and shows your match score climb (e.g. 28% → 84%).
Which keywords to copy from the job description
Pull keywords from three places in the posting: the title, the requirements list, and the "nice to have" section. Prioritise hard, checkable terms — tools, methods and deliverables (e.g. Figma, prototyping, wireframes, user research, usability testing, design systems, information architecture, interaction design, WCAG / accessibility, developer handoff, A/B testing, Hotjar or analytics tools). Only include a keyword if it is genuinely true for you; ATS keyword-stuffing that you can't back up gets exposed in the interview — and in the portfolio review.
How to quantify your design achievements
Recruiters skim for outcomes, not artboards. Turn "redesigned the onboarding" into "redesigned onboarding after 8 usability sessions, cutting drop-off at the first step 25% and support tickets about setup by a third". Reach for: task success rate, conversion, drop-off, time-on-task, usability findings shipped, design-system adoption, accessibility issues resolved. MaxCV suggests where a metric belongs and keeps the number tied to your real work.
Hard and soft skills that match the offer
Hard skills should be a near-mirror of the posting: design tools, research methods, prototyping fidelity, design-system work, accessibility standards, any front-end literacy the offer asks for (HTML/CSS awareness). Soft skills matter most when the offer names them — "presenting to stakeholders", "advocating for the user", "receiving and giving critique" — so include only those the offer actually asks for, and show them in a bullet rather than as a bare list.
Tailoring a designer CV with little or no experience
Junior designer CVs win by mirroring the offer with case studies, not job titles. Reframe each portfolio project in the posting's terms: their "end-to-end product design" becomes your "took a budgeting app from user interviews through wireframes to a tested Figma prototype — 3 usability rounds, 12 participants". Unsolicited redesigns count when they show process, not just pixels. Lead with the methods and tools the offer names, and let MaxCV align the wording so a thin history still scores against the ATS.