During the early 2000's there was an IT slump in CA due to the dot-com crash, so I spent a lot of time sending out resumes. Eventually I created a script to qui

During the early 2000's there was an IT slump in CA due to the dot-com crash, so I spent a lot of time sending out resumes. Eventually I created a script to quickly customize them for a given job ad. It had topic meta-tags, and each topic had four levels: high, medium, low, skip. The level would control the placement and amount of detail given to each topic. Medium would default to "low" if there were no medium-level content/detail. Thus, I didn't have to always type 3 variations per section+topic. There were other switches I won't go into. A found that highlighting applicable domain experience helped a lot: "billing", "budgeting", etc. I still did some hand customization, but the script allowed me to send out roughly 1,000 resumes and/or CV's all over the nation without getting carpel tunnel. (I preferred to stay in CA, but the market was really dry at the time. Plus, location mattered less if it were only a contract.) When feeling trapped, a programmer always "writes a script".