I applied for 100+ jobs in Australia and heard nothing. Here is what was actually going wrong.

If you are reading this at 11pm after another day of nothing, start here: applying for 100 jobs and hearing back on three is not evidence that you are bad at your job, or bad at applying. It is close to the current normal in Australia, particularly in IT. Almost nobody says that out loud, which is why so many people quietly conclude the problem is them.

The useful part is that a fair chunk of what goes wrong is small, invisible from your side, and genuinely fixable. This is what I found out when I went looking, and what I would tell myself 100 applications ago.

First, the thing you have probably been told that is not true

You will have read that applicant tracking systems automatically reject most resumes before a human ever sees them. Some version of “75% of resumes are rejected by robots” is the single most repeated claim in this entire field.

It is not really how these systems work. An ATS is mostly a database with a search box. It parses your resume into fields, stores it, and lets a recruiter search, filter and sort. There are auto-reject rules in some setups, but they are usually blunt and explicit: knock-out questions you answered at the application form, a required licence, work rights. The mental image of an AI silently scoring you out of the running is mostly wrong.

This matters because the myth sends people in the wrong direction. If you believe a robot is scanning for keywords, you start stuffing keywords, which a human then reads and quietly discards. The real problem is duller and more fixable.

What actually happens after you press send

A single advertised role in Australia can attract hundreds of applicants. A recruiter, often filling several roles at once, is not reading hundreds of resumes properly. They search the pile for the things the hiring manager said mattered, sort by whatever looks promising, and skim the top of that list for a few seconds each.

So the question is not “is my resume good”. It is: when somebody searches this pile for the two or three things that matter, does my resume come back, and does it survive eight seconds of skimming? Those are different questions and the second one is where most applications die.

Why it got harder, and why it is not in your head

Generative AI made it trivial to produce a plausible, tailored-looking application in about thirty seconds. Predictably, application volumes went up sharply. Employers responded the way anyone drowning responds: by filtering harder, earlier and more mechanically.

In IT this landed first and hardest, on top of a market that was already tightening. The result is a genuinely worse ratio for everyone, including the people who are writing every application by hand.

If you feel like you got worse at this over the last couple of years: you probably did not. The channel flooded. That is not a comforting story so much as an accurate one, and it changes what you should do about it, which is the next section.

The Australian specifics that quietly sink applications

Most resume advice online is American, and some of it is actively wrong here. These are the ones I see cost people the most.

1. Ambiguous work rights

This is the big one and it is barely covered anywhere. If a recruiter cannot tell within seconds whether they are legally able to hire you, the ambiguity does not get investigated. It gets resolved against you, because there are two hundred other applications and one of them is unambiguous.

Put it in plain words near your contact details. “Australian citizen”, “Permanent resident”, “Full working rights”, or the specific visa and its expiry. If you have full rights, saying so costs one line and removes an entire category of silent rejection. If your situation is more complicated, stating it plainly still beats leaving a recruiter to guess, because guessing is not what happens. Skipping is what happens.

If you are not certain what your own conditions actually are, do not guess either. The Department of Home Affairs lets you check them directly with VEVO, which is the same system employers use to verify you. Getting the wording right matters more than getting it brief, so there is a whole guide on exactly what to write, for citizens, permanent residents and every kind of visa.

2. Your full street address

Suburb and state is the Australian convention. “Parramatta, NSW”, not your street number. Recruiters want to know roughly where you are for commute and location filtering, and nothing more. A full address reads as dated and hands personal information to a stranger for no benefit.

3. A photo

Standard in parts of Europe, wrong here. Australian resumes do not carry one. Beyond convention, it invites bias you gain nothing from, and some larger employers actively strip or flag them. SEEK says the same thing, and they see more Australian resumes than anyone.

4. American spelling

Organised, not organized. Specialise, not specialize. It is small, and it is noticed, and when a resume is being skimmed for fit, small signals of “this was not written for us” add up. Set your word processor to English (Australia) once and forget about it. The Australian Government Style Manual is the reference if you ever need to settle an argument about a particular word.

5. A layout the parser mangles

This is where the ATS genuinely does bite, just not in the way the myth suggests. Multi-column layouts, text inside tables, skills rendered as graphics or rating bars, and contact details in the page header can all come out scrambled or missing when the file is parsed into fields. Your resume looks immaculate to you and arrives as soup.

Single column, real text, standard section headings that say what they are (Experience, Education, Skills), and a .docx or a text-based PDF. The elegant two-column template is the most common own goal in this whole list. The Australian resume format guide has the full list, including length and referees, which also differ here.

The one that is not a formatting problem

Sending the same resume to every role is the fastest route to silence, and it is the hardest advice to follow when you are exhausted and the rent is due.

Tailoring does not mean rewriting your life story for each ad. It means reading what the ad actually asks for, and making sure the true things that match are near the top and phrased the way they phrased them. If an ad says “stakeholder engagement” and your resume says “worked with business teams”, those are the same experience and only one of them comes back in a search.

That is a real distinction, not a euphemism. Rephrasing something true so it is recognisable is fair. Claiming a skill you do not have is not, and it falls apart in the first technical conversation.

What I would actually do next

Roughly in order of how much they pay back for the effort:

1. Add a work rights line. One line, five minutes, removes a whole class of silent rejection.
2. Check your resume actually parses. Single column, no tables, no text in the header, real text not images.
3. Trim the address, drop the photo, fix the spelling. Ten minutes, once, and it is done forever.
4. Apply to fewer roles, properly. Five tailored applications will do more than fifty copies. This is also the only one that gets easier rather than harder over time.
5. Keep a record of what you sent where. Partly so you can follow up, mostly so that on the bad days you can see the effort is real rather than imagined.

The honest caveat

None of this guarantees anything. Some of what is happening is a market, not a document, and no resume fixes a role that already has an internal candidate or a hiring freeze nobody announced. Anyone promising you three times the callbacks is selling something and does not have the data.

What this does do is stop you losing applications for reasons that have nothing to do with whether you could do the job. That is the part inside your control, and after 100 applications into the void it is worth taking back.

I built CVShark to check my own resume against exactly this list while job hunting. It is free and needs no account, and it tells you which of these you are tripping on rather than just handing you a number. The longer story is here.