What does an Australian resume look like?

Two to three pages, reverse chronological, with your achievements written as specifics rather than duties. No photo, no date of birth, no marital status, and no street address. Referees either listed or marked as available on request. Australian English and Australian dollars throughout.

Most of the resume advice you will find online is American, and on several of these points it will actively cost you.

Where the American advice is wrong here

  • Length. The one page rule is American. Two to three pages is normal and expected in Australia, and squeezing fifteen years onto one page reads as inexperience rather than discipline. See how long an Australian resume should be.
  • Referees. American resumes leave them off entirely. Australian employers still expect either two named referees or the line "available on request". See whether you need referees.
  • Spelling. Organised, specialised, analysed, programme. A resume full of American spellings tells an Australian reader you did not write it for them.
  • Photos. Common in parts of Europe, normal on LinkedIn, and not done on an Australian resume. It invites bias claims and many recruiters will ask you to remove it.

The structure that works

  1. Name and contact. Phone, email, suburb and state. No full street address, and no date of birth.
  2. A short summary. Three or four lines saying what you do and what you are looking for. Skip it if it would only restate your last job title.
  3. Skills. A compact list of the concrete ones. Software, systems, licences, languages. Not "team player".
  4. Experience, most recent first. Employer, title, location, dates as MM/YYYY. Then achievements, not duties.
  5. Education and registrations. Degrees, and anything with a registration number: AHPRA, CPA, White Card, teaching accreditation, a trade licence.
  6. Referees. Two, or the line saying they are available.

Achievements, not duties

This is the single biggest difference between a resume that gets a call and one that does not, and it has nothing to do with formatting.

A duty says what you were responsible for. An achievement says what changed because you were there. "Responsible for despatch reporting" tells a reader nothing that your job title did not already tell them. "Rebuilt the daily despatch reconciliation four depots relied on, taking the morning close from ninety minutes to twenty" tells them what you would do for them.

You do not need a number for every line. You need a number for the two or three that matter, and everything else can be plain.

Applicant tracking systems, honestly

Most Australian employers of any size run one, and a good deal of what is written about beating them is nonsense. What genuinely helps is dull: a normal document with real headings, no text inside images, no critical information in headers or footers, standard section names, and a PDF unless the ad asks for Word. Keyword stuffing does not help, and a human reads it after the system does.