The Australian resume format, and where overseas advice gets it wrong

Australian resumes are not American ones with the spelling changed. There are a handful of real conventions here, and the tools most people reach for are built around a different market, so they quietly steer you wrong. This is the whole list.

Resume or CV? Both, and it does not matter

In Australia the two words are used interchangeably for the same document, and a job ad asking for a CV is not asking for the ten-page academic version used in the UK or Europe. Send the same document either way. The only place a genuine academic CV is expected is university research and medical roles, and those ads say so explicitly.

Length: two to three pages

This is the one that most surprises people arriving from the US, where one page is the rule. Here, two pages is normal and three is fine for anyone with a decade or more of experience. A one-page resume from a senior candidate reads as thin rather than disciplined.

It is not licence to pad. The test is whether page three earns itself, not whether you can fill it.

The contact block

Top of page one, and shorter than you think. Name, phone, email, suburb and state, work rights, and a LinkedIn URL if it is current.

• Suburb and state, not a street address. “Parramatta, NSW”. Location is used for commute and filtering; the rest is personal information handed to a stranger for no benefit.
• Your work rights, in one line. The highest value line on the page if you are not obviously a citizen, and frequently left off by people who are. It has its own guide, because it is the single most common silent rejection here.
• No photo. Standard in parts of Europe, wrong here. It invites bias you gain nothing from, and some larger employers strip or flag them. SEEK says the same.
• No date of birth, marital status, nationality or gender. Common on resumes in many countries, and here it reads as dated at best. Employers generally do not want it on file either.

The sections, in the order they are expected

1. Professional summary. Three or four lines, not a paragraph of adjectives. What you do, at what level, and what you are looking for. This is the part most worth rewriting per application, because it is the part actually read first.
2. Skills. A plain list of real ones. No rating bars, no five-star graphics, no skill clouds. They parse badly and say nothing, since nobody has ever given themselves three stars.
3. Employment history. Reverse chronological. Job title, employer, dates, then what you actually did and what changed because you did it.
4. Education. Qualification, institution, year. Overseas qualifications are worth naming the country for, and worth noting any Australian recognition if you have it.
5. Licences and certifications, if relevant. Trades, health, education and government roles often screen on these, and a missing licence is a genuine automatic knock-out where one applies.
6. Referees. More on this below, because Australia differs here.

Use plain headings that say what they are. “Employment history”, not “Where I have made an impact”. Parsers match on the standard words, and a human skimming is looking for them too.

Referees, which Australia treats differently

Australian employers expect referees, and the section being present matters more than the detail. “Referees available on request” is accepted and remains the sensible default: it keeps other people's phone numbers out of a database you do not control, and it means nobody is called before you know a process is serious.

Two referees, with permission asked in advance. A former manager beats a colleague, and a colleague beats a friend with an impressive title.

Formatting that survives being parsed

This is where an applicant tracking system genuinely does bite, though not in the way the “robots reject your resume” stories suggest. Your file gets parsed into fields, and a layout that looks elegant can arrive as soup.

• Single column. The two-column template with a sidebar is the most common own goal in this whole list. Parsers read in one direction and interleave the columns.
• Nothing important in the header or footer. Contact details in a page header are frequently dropped entirely, which means a strong resume that nobody can reply to.
• No tables, text boxes or graphics carrying content. If it only exists as an image, it does not exist.
• Real text, standard fonts. No fancy glyph substitutions, no icons in place of words like “email”.
• .docx, or a text-based PDF. Both parse fine. A PDF exported as an image does not. If you cannot select the text in your own PDF, neither can anything else.

Australian spelling

Organised, specialise, analyse, centre, licence as a noun. Set your word processor to English (Australia) once and stop thinking about it. The Australian Government Style Manual settles individual words, and is the reference government and many large employers actually use.

It is a small thing that accumulates. A resume full of American spelling signals a document written for somewhere else and reused here, which is exactly the impression tailoring exists to avoid.

The part format cannot fix

A correctly formatted resume that says the same thing to every employer is still a generic application. Format gets you read; content gets you called. Once the structure is right, the work moves to making sure the true things that match this particular ad are near the top, in the words that ad used.

The guide on why applications go unanswered covers that side, and CVShark checks a resume against everything on this page for free, without an account.