Choose from a wide range of NEWCV resume templates and customize your NEWCV design with a single click.
Use ATS-optimised Resume and resume templates that pass applicant tracking systems. Our Resume builder helps recruiters read, scan, and shortlist your Resume faster.
Use professional field-tested resume templates that follow the exact Resume rules employers look for.
Create Resume
Use professional field-tested resume templates that follow the exact Resume rules employers look for.
Create ResumeA combination resume in Australia blends a skills-focused resume with a reverse-chronological work history. It can work well if you are changing careers, returning to work, moving from overseas into the Australian job market, or trying to reposition mixed experience into one clear direction. But it can also backfire if it looks like you are hiding gaps, downplaying job instability, or avoiding a clear employment timeline. In recruitment, format is never just design. It changes how quickly a recruiter understands your story. A good combination resume makes your relevance obvious without making your career history look suspicious. A weak one feels like a workaround, and recruiters are very good at spotting workarounds.
A combination resume is a resume format that gives strong visibility to your relevant skills, achievements, and capabilities while still including a proper employment history. It is sometimes called a hybrid resume because it combines two formats:
A functional resume, which focuses heavily on skills and capabilities
A chronological resume, which lists your work history from most recent to oldest
In Australia, the standard resume format is usually reverse chronological. That means recruiters expect to see your recent roles, employers, dates, responsibilities, and achievements clearly laid out. A combination resume adjusts that structure by placing a stronger skills or career highlights section before the detailed work history.
The important thing to understand is this: a combination resume is not an excuse to bury your job history. That is where many candidates get it wrong.
A proper Australian combination resume still needs to show:
Your name and contact details
A targeted professional summary
Key skills aligned to the job
A combination resume works best when your skills are more relevant than your job titles, but your work history still supports the story.
That distinction matters.
If your background is messy, unrelated, or inconsistent, a combination resume can help create a clearer bridge between where you have been and where you are going. But it only works when the bridge is believable. You cannot use formatting to manufacture relevance that is not there.
If you are moving into a new field, your previous job titles may not immediately match the roles you are applying for. A combination resume can help you bring transferable skills to the front.
For example, someone moving from retail management into customer success may want to highlight:
Client relationship management
Complaint resolution
Sales performance
Team leadership
Selected achievements or career highlights
Relevant employment history with dates
Education, qualifications, licences, or certifications
Optional sections such as technical skills, volunteer work, memberships, or languages
The format should help the reader understand your value faster. It should not make them work harder to figure out where you worked, when you worked there, or whether your experience is recent.
This is where I see candidates accidentally damage themselves. They choose a combination resume because they want to “focus on transferable skills”, which can be valid. But then they remove too much context. Recruiters do not hire skills floating in the air. They hire skills attached to evidence, roles, industries, scope, outcomes, and credibility.
CRM usage
Retention and service improvement
If the resume starts only with “Store Manager”, a recruiter may quickly assume the candidate is purely retail. A combination format lets the candidate reposition the experience before that assumption hardens.
But here is the recruiter reality: transferable skills are only convincing when they are specific. “Strong communication skills” means almost nothing. “Managed escalated customer complaints across a high-volume store environment and improved resolution time by refining handover processes” tells me something useful.
A combination resume can help if you are returning after parental leave, caregiving, study, illness, relocation, redundancy, or another career break.
The goal is not to hide the break. The goal is to stop the break from becoming the first and only thing the recruiter notices.
A well-written combination resume can lead with your strongest relevant capabilities, recent training, volunteer work, consulting, short projects, or previous achievements, then show your employment timeline honestly.
Australian employers are generally used to seeing career breaks. What creates concern is not the break itself. It is vagueness. If the resume feels evasive, the recruiter starts filling in blanks, and candidates rarely benefit from that.
If you have strong overseas experience but limited Australian experience, a combination resume can be useful because it helps translate your background into Australian hiring language.
This is especially relevant when job titles, company names, industry structures, or qualifications are not immediately familiar to Australian recruiters.
For example, a finance professional from overseas may need to clarify:
Local equivalents of responsibilities
Systems used, such as SAP, Xero, MYOB, Oracle, or Excel
Regulatory exposure where relevant
Team size and reporting lines
Budget size, transaction volume, or client portfolio
Whether experience aligns with Australian standards or industry expectations
The mistake I often see is candidates assuming recruiters will “understand” overseas experience automatically. Sometimes they will. Often they will not. Recruiters are screening fast, and unfamiliar employers or titles can make strong experience look less obvious than it actually is.
A combination resume can help by translating your value before listing the detailed work history.
If you have worked across different industries, contract roles, projects, casual jobs, or portfolio work, a combination resume can help create a coherent professional identity.
This is common in Australia, especially across:
Project management
Marketing and communications
IT and digital roles
Community services
Education and training
Construction administration
Consulting
Hospitality leadership
Start-up environments
Mixed experience is not automatically a problem. The problem is when the resume makes the reader ask, “So what are you actually targeting?”
A combination resume should answer that quickly.
For technical, project-based, or specialist roles, a combination resume can work well because recruiters often need to see tools, methodologies, systems, and capability areas before reading every role.
This may apply to:
Business analysts
Project coordinators and project managers
Software developers
Data analysts
Cyber security professionals
Engineers
WHS professionals
Change managers
Procurement specialists
Digital marketers
In these cases, a skills snapshot can be useful, but it must not become a keyword dump. A recruiter can tell the difference between a candidate who has actually used Jira, Power BI, Salesforce, or Agile delivery methods and someone who has pasted keywords from the job ad like they are decorating a Christmas tree.
A combination resume can hurt your application when it makes your career history harder to assess.
Recruiters and hiring managers are not just looking for skills. They are checking risk, relevance, recency, progression, stability, scope, and evidence. If your format blocks any of that, it creates friction.
Career gaps are not automatically an issue. Hidden gaps are.
If you use a large skills section but provide vague employment dates such as “2019 to present” or leave out months when they matter, the reader may wonder what is missing. In competitive hiring processes, uncertainty usually does not help the candidate.
You do not need to overexplain every gap on the resume, but you do need to make the timeline easy to follow.
Weak Example
“Various roles in administration and customer service”
This tells me almost nothing. It also makes me wonder why the candidate is avoiding details.
Good Example
“Customer Service Officer, ABC Utilities, Melbourne, March 2021 to October 2023”
This gives a recruiter enough context to understand the role and timeline.
A combination resume often starts with key skills. That can be powerful, but only if the skills are meaningful.
Generic skills do not persuade recruiters because every candidate claims them.
Weak skills sections usually include phrases like:
Excellent communication skills
Hardworking and reliable
Team player
Attention to detail
Fast learner
Problem solver
None of these are bad qualities. They are just not enough. Recruiters read them constantly, and without evidence, they become wallpaper.
A stronger combination resume connects skills to job requirements and proof.
Good Example
Stakeholder coordination across operations, sales, and finance teams to resolve service issues and improve customer response times
Rostering and workforce planning for teams of up to 35 staff across peak trading periods
CRM data management, reporting, and customer follow-up using Salesforce and Excel
That gives the recruiter something to assess.
In Australia, recent experience carries weight. If your most recent role is highly relevant, do not hide it under a long skills summary.
I have seen candidates with excellent recent experience weaken their resume because they tried to be clever with format. The recruiter should not have to scroll halfway down the page to find your current job.
If your recent role is your strongest selling point, lead with a short summary, then show your employment history quickly. You can still include a key skills section, but keep it tight.
A purely functional resume is risky in the Australian job market because it separates skills from employment history. Recruiters often dislike this because it makes verification harder.
A combination resume should not remove accountability. It should still show where each achievement came from.
For example, instead of listing “Leadership” as a broad skill with vague claims, show leadership inside your role achievements:
Led a team of 12 customer service staff across roster planning, coaching, escalation handling, and daily performance reviews
Reduced onboarding time for new starters by creating a practical training checklist and shadowing process
Now the skill is attached to evidence.
The best combination resume structure for Australia is clear, ATS-friendly, evidence-based, and easy for a human recruiter to scan quickly.
Do not overdesign it. Do not use columns if they make the content harder to read. Do not rely on graphics, icons, ratings bars, or heavy formatting. A resume is not a brochure. It is a decision document.
A strong Australian combination resume usually follows this structure:
Name and contact details
Professional summary
Key skills or capability snapshot
Selected achievements
Employment history
Education and qualifications
Technical skills, licences, memberships, or additional information
This structure works because it gives recruiters the relevance first, then the evidence.
Your name should be the heading. You do not need to write “Resume” at the top. Recruiters know what they are looking at. Hopefully.
Include:
Full name
Mobile number
Professional email address
City and state
LinkedIn URL if it is complete and aligned
Work rights if relevant
For Australia, you generally do not need to include:
Date of birth
Marital status
Full residential address
Photo, unless specifically required for a particular industry or country context
Nationality, unless it relates directly to work rights or security clearance requirements
If you are applying from overseas or have recently arrived in Australia, make your location and work rights clear. Recruiters need to know whether you are immediately available locally, require sponsorship, or already have valid work rights.
Your professional summary should be short, specific, and targeted. It should explain who you are professionally, what you bring, and what kind of role you are suited for.
Avoid summaries that sound like a motivational poster.
Weak Example
“Highly motivated professional with excellent communication skills seeking an opportunity to grow and contribute to a dynamic organisation.”
This says nothing useful. It could belong to almost anyone.
Good Example
“Customer service and operations professional with six years’ experience across high-volume retail and contact centre environments. Strong background in complaint resolution, team coordination, rostering, CRM administration, and process improvement. Now targeting customer success and client support roles where service quality, stakeholder follow-up, and retention matter.”
This works because it creates a clear bridge between past experience and target roles.
This is the section that makes the combination resume different from a standard chronological resume.
Keep it focused. Usually six to ten skill areas are enough. Each skill should be relevant to the role you are applying for.
For example, for an administration candidate targeting office coordinator roles:
Office administration and diary coordination
Supplier communication and invoice processing
Customer and stakeholder support
Document control and data entry
Meeting preparation and minutes
Travel booking and expense reconciliation
CRM, Microsoft Office, SharePoint, and Excel
Notice that these are practical, job-relevant capabilities. Not personality traits dressed up as strategy.
This section can work beautifully in a combination resume, especially when your achievements are stronger than your job titles.
Include three to five achievements that prove your value.
Good achievements often show:
Improvement
Scale
Volume
Complexity
Commercial impact
Customer impact
Risk reduction
Process improvement
Leadership
Technical delivery
Good Example
Improved customer response times by redesigning the shared inbox triage process and introducing daily escalation checks
Supported payroll and rostering accuracy for 80 casual staff across multiple sites during peak trading periods
Coordinated onboarding documentation, compliance checks, and induction scheduling for new starters across operations and customer service teams
If you cannot quantify the result, explain the practical outcome. Not every role has neat metrics, and pretending everything was “increased by 37 percent” can start to look a little too polished.
Your employment history still matters. This is where recruiters check recency, progression, stability, and evidence.
For each role, include:
Job title
Company name
Location
Dates of employment
Short role context
Key responsibilities and achievements
Keep the role context brief. The achievement bullets should do the real work.
A good structure looks like this:
Job Title, Company, Location
Month Year to Month Year
Short one-line description of the role scope, team, industry, or business context.
Achievement or responsibility linked to the target role
Achievement or responsibility linked to outcomes
Achievement or responsibility showing tools, systems, people, process, or complexity
This is where many candidates overwrite. You do not need to describe every task you have ever done. You need to show the experience that supports the next hiring decision.
Place education after employment history unless your qualification is very recent, highly relevant, or more important than your work experience.
Include:
Qualification name
Institution
Year completed or expected completion
Relevant certifications
Licences, tickets, or professional memberships where relevant
For regulated or technical roles, licences and certifications may deserve stronger visibility. For example:
White Card
Working with Children Check
Police Check
First Aid Certificate
CPA or CA progress
Agile, Scrum, PRINCE2, ITIL, AWS, Microsoft, or cyber security certifications
HR licence, forklift licence, or trade licences
The key is relevance. Do not make the recruiter dig for a mandatory requirement.
A chronological resume is usually the safest format in Australia. A combination resume is useful when you need to reposition your experience without hiding your timeline.
Here is the practical difference.
A chronological resume says, “Here is my career history. You can see my relevance through my roles.”
A combination resume says, “Here is the relevance first. Now here is the career history that proves it.”
Use a chronological resume when your recent job titles clearly match the role you want. For example, if you are a payroll officer applying for payroll officer roles, there is usually no need to complicate the structure. Your recent experience already does the positioning.
Use a combination resume when your relevance is real but not immediately obvious from your job titles. For example, if you are a teacher moving into learning and development, your job title may not match the new role, but your skills in facilitation, curriculum design, stakeholder communication, assessment, and learner engagement may be highly relevant.
The danger is using a combination resume because you hope the reader will ignore your work history. They will not. Recruiters are trained to check the timeline. Hiring managers check it too, especially when they are deciding whether your background matches the level and scope of the role.
A combination resume should make the story clearer, not softer.
A combination resume is usually stronger than a functional resume for Australian job applications because it keeps your work history visible.
A functional resume focuses mostly on skills and often pushes employment history to the bottom with minimal detail. That can create mistrust.
Recruiters tend to ask:
Where did this experience happen?
How recent is it?
Was this skill used in a paid role, project, study environment, or volunteer setting?
What level of responsibility did the candidate actually hold?
Are they avoiding dates or job titles?
A combination resume answers those questions better because it gives both skills and evidence.
If you are tempted to use a functional resume because your background is complicated, I would usually suggest a combination resume instead. It gives you room to position your strengths without making the recruiter suspicious.
The only time a more functional structure may be acceptable is when you are creating a networking profile, career change pitch, or capability statement rather than a formal job application. For actual job applications in Australia, keep the employment history clear.
Recruiters do not read resumes like novels. They scan, assess, question, compare, and decide whether to move you forward.
A combination resume needs to survive that behaviour.
The first scan usually checks:
What role is this person targeting?
Does their background match the job?
Is the experience recent enough?
Do they have the required skills, systems, licences, or qualifications?
Are there gaps or confusing moves?
Does the resume feel credible?
Is it worth reading more deeply?
That first scan can be brutally fast. Not because recruiters are careless, but because hiring pipelines can be messy, overloaded, and full of applications that do not match the role.
The combination resume earns attention when the top third of the first page makes the candidate’s relevance obvious. It loses attention when the first page is full of vague claims, long summaries, generic skills, or dense paragraphs.
Hiring managers read slightly differently. They are often looking for evidence that you can handle their specific problem. They may care less about perfect resume structure and more about whether your background feels useful for the team.
That means your combination resume should not just say you have skills. It should show how those skills solve real workplace problems.
For example, if the role needs someone who can handle stakeholder pressure, do not just list “stakeholder management”. Show the environment:
Managed competing requests from operations, finance, and client teams during weekly service delivery reviews
Resolved escalations by clarifying ownership, documenting agreed actions, and following up unresolved issues before deadlines slipped
That is the difference between keyword matching and actual credibility.
A combination resume can be ATS-friendly if it uses clear headings, standard formatting, relevant keywords, and a readable structure.
The ATS is not the villain candidates often imagine. The bigger issue is that many resumes are badly structured, unclear, or poorly aligned to the job description. Then candidates blame the system when the real problem is positioning.
For Australian job applications, keep your combination resume simple and readable.
Use standard headings such as:
Professional Summary
Key Skills
Career Highlights
Employment History
Education
Certifications
Technical Skills
Avoid unusual headings like “My Journey”, “Where I Shine”, or “Things I Bring to the Table”. I know they sound more human. Unfortunately, they can also make your resume harder to parse and harder to scan.
Make sure your resume includes relevant keywords naturally. This does not mean copying and pasting the job ad into your resume. It means using the same professional language where it accurately reflects your experience.
For example, if the job ad asks for “stakeholder management”, and your resume only says “worked with people”, you are underselling yourself. Use the employer’s language when it is true.
Keep formatting clean:
Use a single-column layout
Avoid text boxes for important content
Avoid tables if they affect readability
Avoid icons instead of words
Avoid skill rating bars
Use standard fonts
Save as Word or PDF according to the application instructions
Keep dates consistent
Use clear job titles and employer names
A recruiter should not have to decode your resume. The ATS should not have to wrestle with it either.
Most Australian resumes are two to four pages, depending on career level, industry, and experience.
For a combination resume, length control matters because the skills section can easily become bloated. If you add a long capability section, a long achievements section, and then a full work history, the resume can become repetitive.
As a practical guide:
Early career candidates usually need one to two pages
Mid-career professionals often need two to three pages
Senior professionals may need three to four pages
Executives, academics, government applicants, and technical specialists may need longer depending on requirements
The better question is not “How long should my resume be?” It is “Does every section help the reader make a hiring decision?”
A two-page resume full of vague claims is too long. A three-page resume with relevant, specific evidence can be perfectly appropriate.
What I do not recommend is cutting useful evidence just to obey a rigid one-page rule. That advice often comes from markets where resumes are expected to be shorter. In Australia, a well-structured two or three-page resume is normal for many professionals.
Your summary should do three jobs quickly:
Identify your professional identity
Connect your background to the target role
Give the recruiter a reason to keep reading
It should not be a list of adjectives.
A useful formula is:
“Profession or background with X type of experience across Y environments. Skilled in A, B, and C, with evidence in D or E. Targeting roles where these strengths are directly relevant.”
Here are a few examples.
Example for a career changer
“Retail operations leader with eight years’ experience managing teams, rostering, customer escalations, sales performance, and service improvement across high-volume store environments. Strong background in coaching staff, managing complaints, using CRM and POS systems, and improving daily processes. Now targeting customer success and client support roles where relationship management and service quality are central.”
Example for a migrant professional
“Finance professional with overseas experience across accounts payable, reconciliations, reporting, and stakeholder support in multinational business environments. Confident using Excel, SAP, and month-end reporting processes, with strong attention to compliance, documentation, and process accuracy. Seeking finance officer and accounts roles in Australia with clear scope for local systems and stakeholder exposure.”
Example for a return-to-work candidate
“Administration and customer support professional returning to the workforce after a planned career break. Previous experience includes office coordination, diary management, customer enquiries, document control, and internal stakeholder support. Recently completed updated Microsoft Office and Xero training, with strong availability for part-time or full-time administration roles.”
Notice that these summaries address context without sounding apologetic. That is important. Candidates often overexplain career changes, breaks, or transitions. You do not need to plead. You need to position.
The skills section should be tailored to the role and supported by evidence elsewhere in the resume.
Think of it as a relevance map. It tells the recruiter what to pay attention to when they read the employment history.
Good skills sections are specific to the job family.
For an office administrator:
Diary and inbox management
Customer and supplier communication
Document preparation and records management
Invoice processing and purchase order support
Meeting coordination and minute-taking
Microsoft Office, Excel, Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams
For a project coordinator:
Project documentation and reporting
RAID log, action register, and status update support
Stakeholder coordination and meeting governance
Budget tracking and invoice follow-up
Scheduling, resource coordination, and deadline monitoring
Jira, MS Project, Excel, SharePoint, and PowerPoint
For a customer service professional:
Complaint resolution and escalation handling
CRM case management
High-volume inbound and outbound customer support
Service recovery and follow-up
Customer retention and relationship building
Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Excel, and telephony systems
For a career changer, choose skills that genuinely transfer. Do not overreach. If you have never managed a budget, do not list budget management because the job ad mentions it. Recruiters notice when the resume claims more than the work history supports.
The strongest skills section is not the longest one. It is the one that makes the recruiter think, “Yes, this person understands the work.”
The biggest mistakes are not usually spelling errors or formatting issues. They are positioning mistakes.
If your resume is not getting traction because your target role is unrealistic, changing the format will not fix that.
For example, if you are applying for senior HR business partner roles but your background is mostly HR administration, a combination resume cannot magically close that gap. It can show transferable experience, but it cannot replace missing scope.
The better move is to target roles that bridge the gap, such as HR coordinator, people operations specialist, or junior HR advisor, depending on your actual experience.
Not all skills deserve the same emphasis. A common problem in combination resumes is a massive skills list where Microsoft Word, stakeholder engagement, leadership, strategy, data entry, and compliance all sit together like they carry equal weight.
They do not.
Prioritise the skills most relevant to the job you want. The recruiter should be able to tell what kind of role you are targeting within seconds.
Achievements need context to be meaningful.
“Improved efficiency by 20 percent” sounds good, but I immediately want to know: efficiency of what, how measured, over what period, and through what action?
A stronger version would be:
Even without a percentage, this is more credible because it explains the problem and the action.
The first page of a combination resume needs to work hard, but it should not be crowded.
If you include a long summary, 20 skills, 10 achievements, and a technical skills table before your employment history, the recruiter may lose patience.
Give enough information to create interest, then move into proof.
There is a strange point where a resume becomes so polished that it stops sounding real.
If every bullet says “strategically spearheaded cross-functional transformation initiatives to optimise operational excellence”, I am going to need a coffee and possibly a lie down.
Use clear language. Strong resumes do not need inflated wording. They need accurate positioning and evidence.
A good combination resume should answer five recruiter questions.
Your summary should make the target direction clear. Do not make recruiters guess whether you want administration, operations, project coordination, customer success, or management.
Your skills and achievements should show the strongest match between your background and the role.
Your employment history should prove that the skills are real, recent, and used in practical work settings.
Recruiters need to understand scope. Include team size, customer volume, budgets, systems, reporting lines, project size, or operational complexity where relevant.
This includes unexplained gaps, unclear work rights, short job tenure, inconsistent job titles, missing dates, or claims that do not match the experience.
You do not need to overexplain every possible concern. But you should remove unnecessary confusion. Confusion is expensive in recruitment because the easier candidate often wins.
You should use a combination resume in Australia if your relevant skills need stronger visibility than your job titles provide, but you can still support those skills with a clear and honest work history.
Use it if:
You are changing careers
You are returning after a career break
You have overseas experience that needs translating for Australian employers
You have mixed experience but a clear target role
You have strong project, technical, or transferable skills
Your job titles undersell what you actually did
You need to reposition your background without hiding your timeline
Avoid it if:
Your recent experience already clearly matches the target role
You are using it to hide gaps or short tenure
Your skills section is generic and unsupported
It makes your resume longer without making it clearer
It delays the recruiter from seeing your current or most recent role
My honest view: a combination resume can be excellent when used strategically, but it is not the default best choice for everyone. In Australia, clarity wins. If the format makes your story clearer, use it. If it makes your story feel slippery, do not.
The best resume format is the one that helps the recruiter understand your fit quickly and trust the evidence behind it.
Use this structure as a practical guide.
Name
Mobile number
Email address
City, State
LinkedIn URL
Work rights if relevant
Professional Summary
Two to four lines explaining your professional background, relevant experience, core strengths, and target role direction.
Key Skills
Skill area directly relevant to target role
Skill area directly relevant to target role
Skill area directly relevant to target role
Tool, system, or technical capability
Stakeholder, customer, operational, or project capability
Compliance, reporting, leadership, or process capability where relevant
Career Highlights
Achievement showing relevant outcome, scale, or improvement
Achievement showing stakeholder, customer, project, or operational impact
Achievement showing leadership, technical skill, compliance, or problem-solving
Employment History
Job Title, Company, Location
Month Year to Month Year
Brief role context.
Relevant responsibility or achievement
Relevant responsibility or achievement
Relevant responsibility or achievement
Job Title, Company, Location
Month Year to Month Year
Brief role context.
Relevant responsibility or achievement
Relevant responsibility or achievement
Relevant responsibility or achievement
Education and Qualifications
Qualification, Institution, Year
Certification, Provider, Year
Technical Skills or Additional Information
Systems, tools, licences, checks, languages, memberships, or industry-specific requirements.
A combination resume is not about being clever with layout. It is about controlling the order in which your value is understood.
That matters because recruiters are not assessing your resume in a calm, perfect environment. They are comparing you against other applicants, checking must-have criteria, thinking about the hiring manager’s preferences, scanning for risk, and trying to work out whether your experience solves the employer’s problem.
The strongest combination resumes do three things well:
They make the target role obvious
They bring the most relevant skills and achievements forward
They keep the employment history clear enough to build trust
The weakest ones try to distract from the timeline, overuse generic skills, and make the recruiter do too much interpretation.
A resume should not feel like a puzzle. It should feel like evidence.
If you are using a combination resume in Australia, make it clean, specific, honest, and aligned to the job you actually want. Do not hide the complicated parts of your career. Explain them through structure, relevance, and proof.
That is what gets a recruiter to keep reading.
Written by Simar Malhi, a recruiter and headhunter with international recruitment experience. I write about CVs, job applications, hiring decisions, and the reality behind recruitment processes. My goal is to help candidates understand more honestly how employers, recruiters, and hiring managers actually select candidates.
Upload Resume
Import from Linkedin