Resume Writing in Australia: The Complete Guide
What Australian employers actually look for, how to structure your document, and the mistakes that cost interviews.
Resume writing in Australia follows conventions that differ from other markets, and understanding these differences matters more than most job seekers realise. Whether you are entering the workforce for the first time, pivoting industries, or competing for senior roles, your resume remains the document that determines whether you get a conversation or get overlooked.
This guide covers what Australian employers actually look for, how to structure a resume that works, and the mistakes that quietly cost candidates interviews. It will not turn you into a professional resume writer, but it will help you understand what separates documents that open doors from those that disappear into the void.
Contents
What Is a Resume (and When Is It a CV)?
A resume is a strategic marketing document. Its job is not to list everything you have ever done. Its job is to convince a hiring manager that you are worth talking to.
In Australia, the terms “resume” and “CV” are often used interchangeably, but there are distinctions worth understanding.
Resume is the standard term for most private sector roles. It is typically one to two pages and focuses on relevant experience, skills, and achievements tailored to the target role.
Curriculum Vitae (CV) is more common in academic, research, medical, and some government contexts. CVs tend to be longer and more comprehensive, including publications, presentations, grants, and detailed career histories.
Which should you use?
For most Australian job applications, a resume is appropriate. If a job advertisement specifically requests a CV, or if you are applying for academic or research positions, use that format instead. When in doubt, check the job listing or the organisation’s application guidelines.
One important note for international applicants: Australian resumes do not include photographs, date of birth, marital status, or other personal details common in some countries. Including these can actually work against you, as it signals unfamiliarity with local conventions.
What Australian Employers Actually Look For
Here is a reality that changes how you should think about your resume: research from a Ladders eye-tracking study found that recruiters spend an average of 7.4 seconds on initial resume review (Ladders, 2018). That is not a typo. You have less than eight seconds to make an impression.
During that initial scan, recruiters are not reading. They are pattern-matching. Eye-tracking research shows they scan in an F-pattern or E-pattern, moving top-to-bottom and left-to-right, focusing on specific elements in a predictable order:
- Job titles at each role
- Company names and industry context
- Dates to understand timeline and tenure
- Education credentials
If those elements align with what they are looking for, you earn a closer read. If they do not, you are out. This happens before anyone reads your carefully crafted bullet points.
What Does This Mean Practically?
Your resume needs to pass two tests. First, it needs to survive the 7.4-second scan by having clear visual hierarchy, logical structure, and immediately visible alignment with the target role. Second, it needs to reward the closer read by demonstrating genuine value through concrete achievements and relevant capabilities.
Most resumes fail the first test. They bury critical information, use confusing layouts, or front-load details that do not matter to the specific role. Understanding this scanning behaviour is the foundation of effective resume strategy.
The employer’s perspective matters here. Recruiters reviewing dozens or hundreds of applications are not being lazy or unfair when they scan quickly. They are being efficient. Their job is to identify candidates worth interviewing, and they have learned through experience which signals predict a good fit and which predict wasted time. Your resume needs to work with this reality, not against it.
This means every decision you make about your resume should be filtered through one question: does this help the employer understand my value quickly and clearly? Anything that slows comprehension, creates confusion, or buries relevant information works against you, regardless of how impressive that information might be.
Research also indicates that 77% of recruiters prefer two-page resumes over one page for mid-career and senior candidates (ResumeGo, 2024). The one-page rule is outdated for most Australian professionals, though recent graduates or those with limited relevant experience may still benefit from a single page.
Resume Structure That Works
The structure of your resume is not a creative decision. It is a strategic one, and research strongly favours specific approaches.
Essential Sections
Contact details come first: name, phone number, email, and LinkedIn URL (if your profile is complete and professional). Location can be city and state only. Full address is unnecessary and outdated.
Professional summary sits at the top of page one, immediately after contact details. This is prime real estate. Research shows 72% of recruiters want to see a professional summary rather than an objective statement (Industry research, 2024). We will cover this section in detail below.
Professional experience forms the core of your resume. For each role, include your job title, organisation name, location, and dates of employment. Below this, describe your responsibilities and achievements in a way that demonstrates value. More on this shortly.
Education and qualifications typically follow experience for mid-career professionals. For recent graduates, education may come before experience. Include institution name, qualification, and completion year. You do not need to include grades unless they were exceptional or the role specifically requests them.
Skills and certifications can appear as a dedicated section or be woven throughout your experience descriptions. Technical skills, software proficiencies, and industry certifications belong here. Soft skills like “communication” or “teamwork” without evidence are largely ignored.
What to Leave Out
Australian resumes should not include:
- Photographs
- Date of birth or age
- Marital status or family details
- Religious or political affiliations
- Full street address
- Irrelevant hobbies or interests
Length Guidelines
Experience Level | Recommended Length |
|---|---|
| Graduate or early career | 1 page |
| Mid-career (5-15 years) | 2 pages |
| Senior or executive | 2-3 pages |
| Academic CV | As long as necessary |
Two pages is the standard for most Australian professionals. Going beyond two pages requires genuine justification through extensive relevant experience.
The Professional Summary
The professional summary is the most important paragraph on your resume. It appears at the top of page one, directly in the 7.4-second scanning zone, and it frames everything that follows.
A professional summary is not an objective statement. Objective statements (“Seeking a challenging role where I can utilise my skills…”) are outdated and self-focused. They tell employers what you want rather than what you offer.
A strong professional summary does three things:
- Establishes who you are professionally in a single phrase
- Highlights your most relevant value for the target role
- Gives a reason to keep reading through specific credibility markers
The challenge is doing this in three to five sentences without resorting to vague claims or buzzwords. Phrases like “results-driven professional” or “excellent communicator” appear on thousands of resumes and communicate nothing.
What works instead is specificity. Concrete achievements, quantified where possible. Industry context that signals relevance. A clear throughline connecting your experience to what the employer needs.
The professional summary should be tailored for each application, or at least for each type of role you are targeting. A generic summary that tries to appeal to everyone appeals to no one.
Why Tailoring Matters
A professional summary that worked brilliantly for a project management role may actively hurt you when applying for a business analyst position, even if both roles are relevant to your experience. Employers are looking for evidence that you understand what they need. A summary that speaks directly to their specific requirements signals that you have thought carefully about the opportunity. A summary that could apply to any job in your field signals that you are mass-applying without discrimination.
This does not mean rewriting from scratch for every application. It means having a core version that you adjust based on the priorities, terminology, and emphasis relevant to each target role.
Length Guidelines
| Experience Level | Summary Length |
|---|---|
| Entry-level | 2-3 sentences |
| Mid-career | 3-4 sentences |
| Senior or executive | 4-5 sentences |
Anything longer defeats the purpose. This is a summary, not a biography.
Turning Experience Into Impact
This is where most resumes fall apart.
The typical approach is to list job duties: what you were responsible for, what your role involved, what tasks you performed. This tells employers what you were supposed to do. It does not tell them whether you did it well, or what difference you made.
Duties describe the job. Achievements describe you.
Research shows that resumes with quantified achievements generate 40% more interviews than those without, and 64% of recruiters specifically look for numbers and metrics (Industry research, 2024). This is not surprising. Achievements provide evidence. Duties provide job descriptions employers have already read.
The shift from duties to achievements requires a different way of thinking about your experience. Instead of asking “what did I do?” you need to ask “what changed because I was there?”
Consider the difference:
Duty-focused: “Managed social media accounts and created content for marketing campaigns.”
Achievement-focused: “Grew Instagram following from 2,000 to 15,000 in eight months through targeted content strategy, generating 34% of qualified leads for Q3.”
The second version answers the question employers actually care about: what impact did you have?
When You Cannot Quantify
Not every achievement has a number attached. Some roles, particularly in support functions, do not generate obvious metrics. That does not mean you cannot demonstrate impact.
Consider other forms of evidence:
- Scope indicators: team size, budget managed, number of stakeholders
- Recognition: awards, promotions, special assignments
- Improvements: processes streamlined, problems solved, systems implemented
- Outcomes: projects delivered, standards met, relationships built
The goal is specificity, not necessarily statistics. “Reduced customer complaint resolution time” is weaker than “reduced customer complaint resolution time from 72 hours to 24 hours,” but both are stronger than “handled customer complaints.”
The Articulation Challenge
Here is something that surprises many professionals: the people who struggle most with writing about their achievements are often the most accomplished.
There are a few reasons for this. First, when you are good at something, it stops feeling special. You assume everyone can do what you do, so it does not seem worth mentioning. Second, professionals who are genuinely skilled tend to be more aware of the gap between their work and perfection, making them reluctant to claim credit. Third, many workplace cultures discourage self-promotion, training people to deflect praise and credit their teams.
The result is that capable people consistently undersell themselves while less accomplished candidates confidently oversell. Research from Harvard and NBER found that women rate their own performance 25-27% lower than equally performing men (Harvard/NBER, 2022). Studies on impostor syndrome suggest 65-85% of professionals experience it at some point (InnovateMR, 2024).
This is not a problem you can solve by simply deciding to be more confident. It requires a systematic approach to identifying, framing, and articulating value that does not rely on your subjective sense of whether something is “impressive enough” to mention.
The ATS Question: Separating Fact From Fiction
You have probably heard that Applicant Tracking Systems automatically reject most resumes before any human sees them. The internet is full of advice about “beating the ATS” through keyword stuffing, specific formatting tricks, and other technical manoeuvres.
Most of this advice is based on a myth.
The widely-cited claim that “75% of resumes are rejected by ATS before human review” has no credible research basis. It originated from a resume-writing company that went out of business in 2013, and no methodology was ever published (Evidence Base, 2025).
What research actually shows:
A 2025 Enhancv study of 25 U.S. recruiters found that 92% of ATS systems do NOT automatically reject based on format or content. Only 8% of ATS platforms apply hard rejection thresholds, and 56% disable or ignore auto-rejection features entirely (Enhancv, 2025).
What ATS systems actually do is organise applications, extract data into searchable fields, and help recruiters filter and search candidates. The system is a database, not a gatekeeper with autonomous rejection authority.
The real challenges are human, not algorithmic:
- Teams routinely pause job postings after receiving 300-500 applications to focus on the initial wave
- 52% of recruiters say submission timing influences who makes the shortlist
- 76.4% of recruiters search and rank candidates by skills keywords (Jobscan, 2024)
This means keyword optimisation matters, but not because robots are rejecting you. It matters because humans use search functions to find candidates, and if your resume does not contain the terms they search for, you will not appear in their results.
Practical ATS guidance:
- Use standard section headings (Professional Experience, Education, Skills)
- Avoid tables, text boxes, headers, and footers that may not parse correctly
- Include relevant keywords from the job description naturally in your content
- Submit in the requested format (usually PDF or Word)
- Do not try to “trick” the system with white text or hidden keywords
The energy spent trying to game ATS would be better spent ensuring your resume clearly communicates relevant value to the humans who will actually read it.
Common Mistakes That Cost Interviews
Beyond the structural and strategic issues covered above, several common mistakes quietly undermine otherwise decent resumes.
Generic content. Using the same resume for every application signals that you have not thought about what this specific employer needs. Tailoring takes time, but untailored applications have significantly lower success rates.
Leading with duties instead of outcomes. As discussed above, this is the single most common weakness. Every bullet point is an opportunity to demonstrate impact, and most candidates waste it on job descriptions.
Burying critical information. If your most relevant qualification or achievement is on page two, many reviewers will never see it. The 7.4-second scan means top-of-page-one real estate is crucial.
Inconsistent formatting. Mixed date formats, inconsistent spacing, and varying bullet styles create a subconscious impression of carelessness. These details matter more than many candidates realise.
Unexplained gaps. Employment gaps are not automatically disqualifying, but unexplained gaps raise questions. Brief, honest explanations (career break, study, travel, caregiving) are better than silence that invites unfavourable assumptions.
Outdated information. Roles from 15-20 years ago rarely need detailed descriptions. Technical skills that are no longer current (Windows XP proficiency, anyone?) should be removed. Your resume should reflect who you are now, not who you were in 2005.
Typos and errors. This seems obvious, but spelling and grammatical errors remain common and remain damaging. They suggest carelessness, and for roles involving written communication, they can be immediately disqualifying.
Overdesign. Creative fields aside, elaborate graphics, unusual fonts, and complex layouts often backfire. They can cause parsing issues, distract from content, and suggest misaligned priorities. Clean and professional beats clever and creative for most roles.
Trying to be everything to everyone. Some candidates create a single “master resume” and send it unchanged to every opportunity. This approach fails because different roles, even with similar titles, have different priorities. The skills and achievements that matter for a customer service role in healthcare are not identical to those that matter for customer service in technology. Tailoring is not optional.
Focusing on responsibilities instead of results. This is worth emphasising again because it is so prevalent. Job descriptions already tell employers what the role involves. Your resume needs to tell them what you specifically brought to that role that another person would not have. The question is not “what did the job require?” but “what was different because you were the one doing it?”
When to Write Your Own (and When Not To)
Resume writing is a skill, and like any skill, some people have developed it more than others.
Writing your own resume makes sense when:
- You have a clear sense of your professional value and how to articulate it
- Your career trajectory is straightforward and easy to explain
- You are applying for roles similar to what you have done before
- You have time to research, draft, revise, and refine
- You enjoy writing and can be objective about your own experience
Professional help makes sense when:
- You struggle to articulate your achievements without feeling like you are boasting
- Your career path is complex, non-linear, or includes gaps that need strategic framing
- You are changing industries and need to translate experience into new contexts
- You are targeting senior roles where competition is intense
- You have been applying without success and cannot identify why
- You find the process stressful, time-consuming, or overwhelming
There is no shame in either approach. Some people change their own oil; others take their car to a mechanic. Both get the job done. The question is whether you have the expertise, time, and objectivity to do it well yourself.
One thing worth noting: the people who struggle most with resume writing are often highly capable professionals. The same conscientiousness that makes them good at their jobs makes them uncomfortable with self-promotion. The same expertise that impresses colleagues becomes invisible to them because they assume everyone knows what they know.
If you have ever thought “I just did my job, I don’t have any real achievements,” that is a sign you might benefit from an outside perspective.
The objectivity problem is real. Even skilled writers struggle to write about themselves effectively. It is difficult to see your own experience clearly when you are inside it. An outside perspective can identify value you have become blind to, ask questions that surface achievements you had forgotten, and frame your experience in terms that resonate with employers rather than terms that feel natural to you.
This is not about capability. It is about perspective. A surgeon does not perform surgery on themselves, not because they lack skill, but because the situation requires objectivity they cannot provide.
What’s Next?
Your resume is not a record of your past. It is an argument for your future.
Every element, from structure to word choice to visual hierarchy, either supports that argument or undermines it. Understanding what employers actually look for, how they scan and evaluate documents, and what separates effective resumes from forgettable ones gives you a foundation for improvement.
Whether you apply these principles yourself or work with someone who can apply them for you, the goal is the same: a document that earns you the conversations your experience deserves.
Ready to put your best foot forward? Start your project today and let us turn your experience into a resume that opens doors.
References
Enhancv. (2025). ATS and resume screening study. Retrieved from https://enhancv.com/
Harvard/NBER. (2022). Gender differences in self-assessment. Retrieved from https://www.nber.org/
InnovateMR. (2024). Impostor syndrome prevalence study. Retrieved from https://www.innovatemr.com/
Jobscan. (2024). Recruiter behaviour and ATS usage research. Retrieved from https://www.jobscan.co/
Ladders. (2018). Eye-tracking study: How recruiters view resumes. Retrieved from https://www.theladders.com/
ResumeGo. (2024). Resume length preferences study. Retrieved from https://www.resumego.net/
Last updated: January 2026