If you have been writing resumes for jobs in the UK, the US, or anywhere in Asia, the Australian version is going to look different in ways that are easy to get wrong without realising it. Too long. Wrong section order. Photo attached. Wrong spelling. Any of these signals to a hiring manager that you have not done your homework and in a competitive market, that matters before they have read a single line about your experience.
This guide covers the correct Australian resume format, section by section. It explains where Australia diverges from American and British conventions, what to leave out entirely, and how to structure your application so it clears an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) before it reaches a human reader. Whether you are arriving as a skilled migrant, applying from overseas, or re-entering the Australian job market after a break, the principles are the same.
CV or Resume: Which Term Do Australians Use?
Australians use both terms, and in most contexts they mean the same thing. Resume is the more common word in job advertisements and workplace conversations. CV short for curriculum vitae, a Latin phrase meaning ‘course of life’ appears in academic, medical, and research hiring, where a longer document listing publications, research, and academic achievements is expected.
For the vast majority of roles in Australia corporate, government, trades, healthcare, hospitality, and most professional services, a resume is the correct term and a concise document is the expected format. If you are applying for a university lecturer role or a research position, a full academic CV running to multiple pages is appropriate. For everything else, keep it short.
The Standard Australian Resume Format
An Australian resume is a factual, structured document. Its job is to present your qualifications, experience, and skills in a format that a hiring manager can scan in thirty seconds and a recruiter’s ATS can parse without errors. It is not a creative document. Graphic design, unusual fonts, and complex layouts hurt rather than help in most industries.
Length: One to two pages for most applicants. Three pages is acceptable for senior roles with fifteen or more years of directly relevant experience. A four-page resume from a candidate with five years of experience reads as poor editorial judgment, not thoroughness.
File format: PDF is the standard submission format. It preserves your layout across operating systems and devices. Word documents can reflow unpredictably on different versions of Microsoft Office. Save and send as PDF unless the job advertisement specifically requests a Word file.
Font: Calibri, Arial, or Georgia. Size 10 to 12 points for body text, slightly larger for your name and section headings. Avoid decorative or serif-heavy fonts.
Spelling: Australian English. Not American English. Set your document language to Australian English before writing. The differences are consistent: organise not organize, recognised not recognized, behaviour not behavior, labour not labor. A resume using American spelling in an Australian application reads as a template lifted from overseas and not adapted.
Australian Resume Structure: Section by Section
Contact Details
Your name sits at the top as a heading, larger than the body text. Below it: your phone number, a professional email address, your suburb and state (not your full street address), and a LinkedIn URL if your profile is complete and current.
Do not include a photo, your date of birth, your nationality, your visa status, your gender, or your marital status. These details are excluded for good reason. Anti-discrimination law in Australia means employers are not permitted to make hiring decisions based on these characteristics. Including them puts the hiring manager in an uncomfortable position and adds nothing to your application.
Career Profile or Professional Summary
Three to five sentences placed immediately after your contact details. This section gives the hiring manager a fast read on who you are professionally, your experience level, your area of specialisation, and what you are applying for.
Write it last, once the rest of the resume is complete. Tailor it specifically to the role you are applying for. A generic career summary copied across multiple applications is obvious to experienced recruiters and wastes the most-read section of your document.
Key Skills
A short section listing skills directly relevant to the position. Keep it to six to ten items. Pull language directly from the job advertisement where it is accurate ATS software matches keywords, and this section is where that matching happens most directly.
List technical skills and software here. Do not list generic traits like ‘good communicator’ or ‘team player’; these are claimed by every applicant and will go through the assessment process in the interview, not on the page.
Work Experience
Listed in reverse chronological order, most recent role first. Each entry includes: job title, employer name, location (city and state), and dates of employment (month and year).
Under each role, three to six bullet points describing what you did and, where possible, what you achieved. The distinction matters. Duties tell a hiring manager what your job was. Achievements tell them how well you did it.
Duty: Managed social media accounts for the organisation.
Achievement: Grew the organisation’s Instagram following from 4,200 to 18,000 over twelve months, increasing average post engagement by 340 percent.
The achievement version is specific, measurable, and memorable. Where you cannot quantify the outcome precisely, describe the scope: team size, budget managed, geographic reach, or complexity of the project.
Education
Qualification name, institution, and completion year. If you are a recent graduate with less than three years of work experience, education can sit above work experience. For everyone else, work experience comes first.
Include relevant post-graduate qualifications, professional certifications, and trade licences. Omit secondary school results once you have a tertiary qualification they are not relevant to hiring decisions for professional roles.
Referees
List two or three professional referees. Include their name, job title, organisation, and contact details. Alternatively, write ‘References available upon request’ if you prefer not to publish contact details in a document that may circulate widely.
Referees should be former managers or supervisors where possible. A colleague at the same level is weaker. A character reference from a non-work contact is rarely useful in a professional hiring context.
Australian vs American vs British Resume: Key Differences
Overseas applicants frequently submit resumes formatted for another market. The differences are specific enough that hiring managers notice them.
| Element | Australia | United States | United Kingdom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Document name | Resume (or CV for academic roles) | Resume | CV |
| Length | 1–2 pages (3 for senior roles) | 1 page strongly preferred | 2 pages standard |
| Photo | Never included | Never included | Rarely included |
| Date of birth | Never included | Never included | Rarely included |
| Objective statement | Replaced by career profile | Common | Uncommon |
| References | On page or ‘upon request’ | Usually omitted | Usually ‘upon request’ |
| Spelling | Australian English | American English | British English |
| File format | PDF standard | PDF or Word | PDF or Word |
| Hobbies section | Rarely included | Rarely included | Sometimes included |
Writing for ATS: How Australian Employer Systems Work
Applicant Tracking Systems software that screens resumes before a human reads them are used by most medium and large employers in Australia.
A resume that is not ATS-readable gets filtered out regardless of the quality of its content. The formatting requirements for ATS compatibility are specific.
- Use standard section headings: Work Experience, Education, Skills. Clever alternatives like ‘Where I’ve Been’ or ‘My Journey’ are not recognised by keyword-matching software.
- Avoid tables and text boxes for your main content. ATS software often cannot read text inside these elements and leaves the fields blank.
- Avoid headers and footers for contact information. Some ATS systems do not extract text from those regions.
- Use a single-column layout. Multi-column designs that look professional to a human eye are often read out of order by automated systems.
- Do not embed your contact details in an image or graphic element. They will not be extracted.
Testing your resume for ATS compatibility is straightforward. Paste the full text of your resume into a plain text editor like Notepad. If it reads logically from top to bottom with no garbled sections, an ATS will be able to process it.
What to Leave Out of an Australian Resume
Knowing what to exclude matters as much as knowing what to include. Australian hiring norms have clear conventions around several items that overseas applicants often add by default.
A photo. Not included on Australian resumes. Anti-discrimination law is the legal reason. The practical reality is that a photo creates an opportunity for unconscious bias that has no bearing on your ability to do the job. Leave it out entirely.
Date of birth and age. Excluded for the same anti-discrimination reasons. Age is not relevant to hiring decisions, and including it invites the kind of bias that Australian workplace law is designed to prevent.
Visa and immigration status. Unless an employer has explicitly asked for it, do not include your visa subclass or work rights status on your resume. Employers are required to verify your right to work separately. If you have full work rights as a permanent resident or citizen, the distinction handles itself at the offer stage.
Full street address. Your suburb and state is sufficient for contact purposes. A full street address is unnecessary and raises minor privacy concerns if your resume circulates to multiple parties during a hiring process.
References from personal contacts. Referees should come from your professional history. A reference from a friend, family member, or religious leader carries no weight in a professional hiring context.
Outdated or irrelevant roles. If you are fifteen years into your career, your first three jobs after school are not worth listing unless they are directly relevant to the role. Roles more than fifteen years old can be condensed into a single line or omitted entirely.
Generic personality traits. ‘Hardworking,’ ‘passionate,’ and ‘results-driven’ appear on virtually every resume. They do not differentiate you and take up space that could carry real information.
Five Resume Mistakes That Cost Australian Job Seekers Interviews
1. Submitting a Resume That Is Too Long
The single most common mistake among overseas applicants. A two-page resume is the Australian standard for most professional roles. A five-page document signals that the applicant cannot edit. Hiring managers will not read all of it, they will skim it, form a negative impression of your judgment, and move on.
2. Copying Duties Instead of Describing Achievements
A resume that reads like a job description tells the hiring manager what your role involved. It does not tell them how you performed. Every role should have at least one quantified or qualified achievement, even in support or administrative functions.
3. Using American Spelling
Spell-check tools default to the locale set on your device. If you have been working in the US or using American English software, your resume will default to American spelling. Set the language explicitly to Australian English. The errors are consistent and obvious to Australian readers.
4. Ignoring Keywords from the Job Advertisement
ATS systems match the language in your resume against the language in the job advertisement. If the advertisement asks for ‘stakeholder management’ and your resume uses ‘relationship management,’ the match may not register. Read the advertisement carefully and, where the terminology is accurate, use the same words.
5. A Generic Career Summary
The career summary is the most-read section of your resume and the most frequently wasted. A summary that could apply to any candidate in your field provides no information. Rewrite it for every application, referencing the specific role, the employer’s industry, and the skills most relevant to the position.
Australian Resume Advice for Migrants and Overseas Applicants
Overseas-trained professionals face two specific challenges that domestic applicants do not: translating their experience into terms an Australian hiring manager recognises, and establishing credibility without Australian-specific references.
Job titles are not standardised globally. A role titled ‘Senior Associate’ in one country may be equivalent to ‘Senior Manager’ in Australia, or may not be. Where your title differs significantly from the Australian equivalent, it is acceptable to add a brief descriptor. Rather than leaving an unclear title unexplained, a parenthetical clarification in your work experience section removes ambiguity without misrepresenting your seniority.
Qualification recognition is a separate question from resume format, but it interacts with how you present your education. If your overseas qualification has been formally assessed and recognised by an Australian body; Engineers Australia, AHPRA, VETASSESS, or a relevant professional association, note this in your education section. It removes a likely question and demonstrates that you have completed the relevant step proactively.
Australian employers value local experience, and the absence of it is a real factor in competitive hiring. Volunteering, professional association membership, or short-term contract work in Australia all of which can begin after arrival fills this gap faster than most overseas applicants expect.
FAQ
Q. What is the best format for a resume in Australia?
A. A clean, single-column document in PDF format, one to two pages in length, with standard section headings in this order: contact details, career profile, key skills, work experience, education, and referees. Use Calibri or Arial at 11 to 12 point. Avoid graphics, tables as layout tools, photos, and decorative design elements. ATS compatibility depends on readable text, standard headings, and a single-column structure.
Q. Do Australians call it a CV or a resume?
A. Resume is the standard term in Australian workplaces and on job boards including SEEK and Indeed Australia. CV is used specifically in academic, medical, and research hiring, where a longer document covering publications, research, and academic achievements is expected. For most roles, resume is correct.
Q. What is the difference between an Australian and an American resume?
A. Australian resumes typically run one to two pages; American resumes are often kept to one page. Both omit photos and personal details. Australian resumes use a career profile rather than an objective statement. Australian English spelling is expected. The structural approach is similar, but the length convention, spelling, and section labelling differ in ways that are noticeable to hiring managers on either side of the Pacific.
Q. What should never go on a resume in Australia?
A. Photo, date of birth, nationality, visa subclass, full street address, marital status, religion, and personal character references. These are excluded by professional convention and, in the case of protected attributes like age and nationality, relate to anti-discrimination obligations under Australian workplace law.
Q. What are the most common resume mistakes in Australia?
A. Submitting a resume that is too long, listing job duties instead of achievements, using American English spelling, failing to tailor the career summary to each application, and using a complex layout that ATS software cannot parse. Each of these mistakes is common and each is avoidable.
Summary
An Australian resume is a concise, structured document. One to two pages. PDF format. Standard section headings. No photo. No personal details beyond name, phone, email, suburb, and LinkedIn. Achievement-focused work history in reverse chronological order. Australian English throughout.
For overseas applicants, the additional work is in translation: making your experience legible to Australian hiring managers, matching the spelling conventions, and clearing ATS screening before your resume reaches a person. None of these steps are complicated, but most of them require deliberate attention rather than applying a template from another market.
The resume gets you the interview. The interview gets you the job. A correctly formatted, well-written Australian resume removes all the friction between your application and a hiring manager who wants to know if you can do the work.
Compliance Disclaimer
Resume conventions, ATS platforms, and employer expectations change over time. Job advertisement requirements and anti-discrimination obligations are governed by Australian federal and state legislation including the Fair Work Act 2009 and state-based equal opportunity laws. This article reflects general Australian practice as at 2026. Applicants should review job advertisements carefully for role-specific instructions and consult official government resources including the Fair Work Ombudsman and the Australian Human Rights Commission for current legislative guidance.
