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 good Australian resume is not just a list of jobs. It is a screening document. Recruiters and hiring managers use it to decide, often very quickly, whether you are relevant, credible, and worth interviewing. Your resume needs to show the right experience, the right level, the right keywords, and enough evidence that you can do the job without making the reader work too hard.
This resume checklist is designed for Australian job seekers who want to review their resume before applying. I’ll walk you through what I actually look for when screening resumes, what often gets candidates overlooked, and how to make your resume clearer, sharper, and more aligned with how hiring decisions are made in Australia.
Australian resumes are usually direct, practical, and evidence-based. They do not need a photo, personal details like age or marital status, or long career stories that read like a biography. What they do need is clear relevance.
In Australia, most recruiters are looking for three things quickly:
Can this person do the job?
Have they done similar work before?
Is their experience easy to understand in the context of this role?
That sounds simple, but this is where many resumes fail. Candidates often write resumes from their own memory rather than from the employer’s decision-making process. They include everything they have done, but not enough of what the employer needs to see.
A strong Australian resume should make the match obvious. It should show your job title, industry context, responsibilities, achievements, tools, systems, seniority level, and career progression without forcing the reader to decode it.
Recruiters are not reading your resume in a calm little library with a cup of tea and unlimited patience. They are usually comparing multiple candidates, managing hiring manager expectations, and trying to reduce risk. Your resume has to help them do that.
Before you send your resume, check it against the same areas a recruiter naturally scans. I do not start by admiring formatting. I start by checking whether the candidate makes sense for the role.
Your resume should answer these questions quickly:
Is your target role clear?
Is your recent experience relevant?
Are your skills aligned with the job ad?
Are your achievements specific enough?
Is your work history easy to follow?
Does your resume look credible and professional?
Is it suitable for Australian hiring expectations?
Can an ATS read it properly?
Would a hiring manager understand your value without needing extra explanation?
The biggest mistake candidates make is thinking a resume is finished because it looks neat. Neat is not enough. A resume can be beautifully formatted and still weak if it does not show relevance, impact, and decision-making evidence.
Your resume header should be clean and simple. It should include your name, phone number, email address, location, LinkedIn profile, and relevant portfolio or website if needed.
For Australian resumes, your location matters because employers often consider availability, commute, working rights, hybrid expectations, and relocation practicalities. You do not need to include your full home address. Your suburb and state, or city and state, is usually enough.
A strong header includes:
Full name
Mobile number
Professional email address
City and state
LinkedIn URL
Portfolio, GitHub, website, or professional profile if relevant
Do not include:
Date of birth
Marital status
Religion
Nationality unless it is directly relevant to working rights
Passport number
Photo
Full residential address
Unprofessional email address
This is a small section, but it sets the tone. If the first thing a recruiter sees is a cluttered header with unnecessary personal information, it can make the resume feel outdated before they even reach your experience.
Your professional summary should not be a pile of adjectives. I see summaries like “hardworking, passionate, motivated team player with excellent communication skills” all the time. The problem is that every candidate can say that. It does not help me understand your fit.
A good resume summary should tell the reader:
What you do
Your level of experience
Your industry or functional background
Your strongest relevant skills
The type of role you are targeting
One or two proof points that support your value
Weak Example
Motivated professional with strong communication skills and a passion for success. Excellent team player with a positive attitude and ability to work in fast-paced environments.
Good Example
Customer service professional with five years of experience across retail banking and contact centre environments. Skilled in complaint resolution, CRM systems, sales support, and high-volume customer enquiries. Known for handling complex customer issues calmly while maintaining service quality and compliance standards.
The second version tells me what the person actually does. It gives me context, level, environment, systems, and strengths. That is useful. The first version is pleasant but empty.
Your summary should be tailored to the role type you are applying for. If you are applying for administration roles, do not write a summary that sounds like a general customer service profile. If you are applying for project coordinator roles, make sure project support, stakeholder communication, reporting, timelines, and documentation appear early.
This is not keyword stuffing. This is alignment.
One of the most useful things you can do before applying is compare your resume against the job ad line by line. Not to copy it blindly, but to check whether your resume actually reflects the role requirements.
Hiring teams usually screen for:
Job title alignment
Industry relevance
Required technical skills
Systems or tools
Qualifications or licences
Years or level of experience
Stakeholder exposure
Compliance, reporting, or regulatory requirements
Leadership or people management experience
Commercial impact
Here is the hiring reality candidates often miss: employers do not always choose the “best” candidate in the abstract. They choose the candidate who looks most relevant, least risky, and easiest to progress for this specific vacancy.
That means your resume needs to show the right evidence for the role in front of you.
If the job ad asks for payroll experience, your resume should clearly mention payroll duties, systems, pay cycles, award interpretation, or compliance exposure if you have them. Do not hide it under “administrative duties”. That forces the recruiter to guess, and guessing rarely works in your favour.
If the job ad asks for stakeholder management, show who those stakeholders were. Internal teams? Senior executives? Vendors? Government bodies? Customers? Hiring managers think differently about each one.
A resume that says “managed stakeholders” is weaker than one that says “coordinated weekly updates with internal operations teams, external vendors, and senior project leads to keep delivery milestones on track.”
Specificity creates confidence.
Your work experience section is usually the most important part of your Australian resume. This is where recruiters look for proof.
Each role should include:
Job title
Company name
Location
Employment dates
Short company or role context if useful
Key responsibilities
Measurable achievements
Tools, systems, or processes used
Scope of work
Relevant industry context
Your most recent role should usually have the most detail. Older roles can be shorter, especially if they are less relevant.
A common mistake is writing every job with the same level of detail. That makes the resume heavy and unfocused. Recruiters care most about your recent and relevant experience. Your resume should reflect that.
For each role, ask yourself:
What was I responsible for?
What did I improve, manage, deliver, support, reduce, increase, coordinate, or solve?
What systems, tools, processes, or stakeholders were involved?
What would a hiring manager need to know to trust my experience?
What makes this role relevant to the job I want next?
Your bullet points should not read like a generic position description. They should show what you personally did.
Weak Example
Responsible for administration duties and customer support.
Good Example
Managed daily administration for a high-volume service team, including customer enquiries, appointment scheduling, CRM updates, document preparation, and follow-up communication across phone and email channels.
The weak version gives me a label. The good version gives me the work environment, volume, tasks, systems, and communication channels. That is the difference between vague and useful.
Achievements matter, but they need to be believable. Australian employers tend to respond better to clear, grounded achievements than exaggerated claims.
You do not need every achievement to be dramatic. Not everyone “transformed” a department or “revolutionised” a process. Sometimes a strong achievement is simply showing that you improved accuracy, reduced delays, handled complexity, supported a difficult transition, trained new staff, or managed a high workload consistently.
Good achievement areas include:
Revenue growth
Cost savings
Time saved
Process improvement
Error reduction
Customer satisfaction
Compliance improvement
Team performance
Project delivery
Stakeholder outcomes
System implementation
Volume handled
Targets achieved
Risk reduced
Weak Example
Improved team performance and helped the business succeed.
Good Example
Improved invoice processing turnaround by introducing a shared tracking system, reducing missed approvals and helping the finance team process supplier payments more consistently before month-end deadlines.
The good version works because it explains the action and the outcome. It does not just claim improvement. It shows how the improvement happened.
If you do not have numbers, use scale and context. For example:
Supported recruitment coordination for multiple vacancies across corporate and operational roles
Managed front desk enquiries in a busy medical practice with high daily patient volume
Coordinated onboarding documents for new starters across several departments
Prepared weekly sales reports used by managers to monitor pipeline activity
Numbers help, but context also counts. The goal is to make your contribution concrete.
Applicant tracking systems matter, but they are often misunderstood. The ATS is not some magical robot deciding your future while laughing in binary. In most Australian hiring processes, the ATS stores, filters, parses, and helps recruiters manage applications. It may support keyword searching, but humans still make many screening decisions.
That said, keywords absolutely matter because both systems and recruiters rely on them.
Your resume should include relevant keywords from the job ad, such as:
Job titles
Technical skills
Software systems
Certifications
Industry terms
Compliance requirements
Work environments
Methodologies
Tools
Core responsibilities
For example, if you work in HR, terms like employee relations, onboarding, HRIS, recruitment coordination, performance management, policy interpretation, and Fair Work may matter depending on the role.
If you work in accounting, terms like reconciliations, month-end, accounts payable, accounts receivable, BAS, payroll, Xero, MYOB, SAP, and financial reporting may be relevant.
Do not hide important keywords inside clever phrasing. A recruiter searching for “Salesforce” will not find you if your resume only says “customer database”. A hiring manager looking for “case management” may miss your experience if you only describe it as “client support”.
Use the language of the market. That does not mean copying job ads word for word. It means making your experience searchable, recognisable, and aligned with how employers describe the role.
A skills section should help the reader quickly understand your capability. It should not be a random list of soft skills.
A weak skills section usually includes things like:
Communication
Teamwork
Leadership
Time management
Problem-solving
These are not bad skills, but on their own they are too broad. They become more powerful when connected to actual work.
A stronger skills section might include:
Stakeholder communication
Calendar and inbox management
CRM data management
Payroll administration
Accounts payable support
Customer complaint resolution
Executive support
Project coordination
Candidate sourcing
Contract administration
Report preparation
Inventory management
Data analysis
Salesforce, Xero, MYOB, SAP, Workday, ServiceNow, Excel
Soft skills should be demonstrated through experience, not just listed. Anyone can write “strong communication skills”. It is more convincing when your experience shows that you handled customer escalations, coordinated with senior leaders, trained new staff, or managed sensitive employee matters.
For Australian resumes, keep your skills section targeted. A long skills list can look desperate if it includes everything from Microsoft Word to strategic leadership to social media to forklift operations. Choose the skills that support the role you want.
Your resume should be easy to skim. This matters more than people think.
Recruiters scan for relevance first. If your resume is dense, cluttered, overly designed, or difficult to follow, you create friction. Friction is dangerous in recruitment because there are usually other candidates who are easier to assess.
For most Australian professionals, a resume of two to four pages is acceptable, depending on experience level and industry. One page can be too short for experienced candidates. Five or more pages is usually too long unless you are in academia, government selection criteria contexts, senior technical consulting, or a field where detailed project history is expected.
A clean Australian resume should have:
Clear headings
Consistent spacing
Standard fonts
Reverse chronological order
Enough white space
Clear bullet points
No tables that break ATS parsing
No unnecessary graphics
No photo
No excessive colours
No icons replacing important words
Design should support readability. It should not become the main event.
I have seen resumes where the candidate clearly spent more time choosing icons than explaining their achievements. That is the wrong priority. Hiring managers do not shortlist candidates because the resume has a pretty sidebar. They shortlist because the experience looks relevant and credible.
Employment gaps, career changes, and short job tenures are not automatically dealbreakers. But they become a problem when your resume leaves too many unanswered questions.
Recruiters look for patterns. If your resume has several short roles, unexplained gaps, sudden industry changes, or unclear job titles, the reader may pause. That does not mean you are rejected immediately. It means your resume needs to reduce uncertainty.
If you have a career gap, you can briefly explain it where appropriate. Keep it factual and calm.
Examples include:
Career break for family responsibilities
Relocation from overseas to Australia
Contract role completed
Redundancy following organisational restructure
Study period completed before returning to the workforce
Freelance or consulting work during transition
If you are changing careers, your resume should not simply list your past roles and hope the reader connects the dots. You need to show transferable skills clearly.
For example, if you are moving from hospitality into administration, your resume should highlight rostering, bookings, customer communication, supplier coordination, POS systems, cash handling, stock control, complaint resolution, and fast-paced multitasking.
The mistake is saying “I want a new opportunity” without proving why your background is relevant. Employers do not hire potential in a vacuum. They hire potential when it is supported by evidence.
Your education section should be clear, accurate, and relevant. Include degrees, diplomas, certificates, licences, and professional training that support your target role.
For Australian resumes, include:
Qualification name
Institution
Completion year or expected completion year
Relevant licences or registrations
Professional certifications
Industry training where useful
If you are early in your career, education may sit higher on the resume. If you are experienced, it usually sits after work experience unless the qualification is essential to the role.
Do not over-explain old or irrelevant education. If you have a degree and ten years of professional experience, your high school details usually do not need prime resume real estate.
If you have overseas qualifications, make them easy for Australian employers to understand. You may include the local equivalent if you know it, or explain the field clearly. Do not assume the employer understands every institution or qualification title from another country.
For regulated professions, licences and registrations need to be obvious. Nursing, teaching, accounting, engineering, construction, childcare, security, real estate, and trades often require specific credentials. If the role requires it, do not bury it.
In Australia, working rights can affect hiring decisions. You do not always need to include visa details, but if your status is relevant or likely to reassure employers, include it clearly.
Examples:
Australian citizen
Permanent resident
Full working rights in Australia
Temporary visa with full working rights
Student visa with work-hour restrictions
Partner visa with full working rights
Sponsorship required
Be honest. Do not hide sponsorship needs and hope it can be solved later. That usually wastes everyone’s time and creates frustration when the process is already advanced.
If you have full working rights, saying so can reduce uncertainty, especially if you have overseas experience or recently relocated. Recruiters may not ask immediately, but they are often thinking about it.
Working rights are not about judging your capability. They are about whether the employer can legally and practically hire you within their timeline, budget, and internal policy. That is the reality.
A good resume does not only describe where you have been. It positions you for where you are going.
This is where many candidates accidentally undersell themselves. They write their resume as a historical record instead of a positioning document.
Ask yourself:
Does my resume support the role I want next?
Am I highlighting the experience that matters most for that direction?
Am I still giving too much space to outdated or irrelevant work?
Does my current level come across clearly?
Would a recruiter understand whether I am junior, mid-level, senior, specialist, manager, or executive?
Does my resume show growth?
If you are applying for management roles, your resume needs to show leadership scope, team size, decision-making, performance accountability, stakeholder management, and business outcomes.
If you are applying for specialist roles, your resume needs to show technical depth, tools, methodologies, complexity, and subject matter expertise.
If you are applying for entry-level roles, your resume needs to show reliability, transferable skills, education, internships, volunteer work, projects, customer exposure, and practical readiness.
This is not about pretending to be something you are not. It is about making your strongest relevant evidence visible.
Most resume problems are not dramatic. They are small issues that create doubt, friction, or confusion.
The most common mistakes include:
Using a generic resume for every application
Writing vague responsibilities without evidence
Listing duties but no achievements
Making the resume too long or too thin
Using outdated personal details
Including a photo
Overdesigning the layout
Using job titles that do not match market language
Hiding important systems and tools
Failing to explain career gaps or contract roles
Using too many soft skills
Not tailoring the summary
Forgetting working rights where relevant
Using overseas terminology without Australian context
Making the reader work too hard to understand relevance
One of the biggest hidden mistakes is assuming the recruiter will infer your value. They often will not. Not because they are lazy, but because recruitment is comparative. If another candidate communicates their fit more clearly, they become easier to shortlist.
Your resume should not require detective work.
When I review a resume, I am not looking for perfection. I am looking for evidence and alignment.
The internal questions sound more like this:
Is this person close enough to what the hiring manager asked for?
Is their recent experience relevant?
Do they have the must-have skills?
Is their level right for the salary and role scope?
Are there any gaps I need to clarify?
Will the hiring manager understand why I am sending this candidate?
Does anything feel inflated, vague, or inconsistent?
Is this candidate worth a conversation?
That last question matters. The resume does not need to win the job. It needs to win the next step.
This is where candidates sometimes overcomplicate things. A resume is not meant to answer every possible question. It is meant to give enough relevant proof that the employer wants to speak with you.
The best resumes make the recruiter’s job easier. They help me explain the candidate to the hiring manager. They give me evidence to support the shortlist. They reduce risk.
A weak resume does the opposite. It creates questions I cannot answer confidently.
Before you apply, go through this final checklist.
Your resume should have:
A clean header with current contact details
A professional email address
Location listed clearly
LinkedIn profile included if relevant
No photo or unnecessary personal information
A targeted professional summary
Relevant keywords from the job ad
Reverse chronological work history
Clear job titles, company names, locations, and dates
Strong detail for recent and relevant roles
Bullet points that show responsibilities and outcomes
Achievements with numbers or useful context
Relevant systems, tools, and technical skills
A focused skills section
Education and qualifications listed clearly
Licences or registrations where required
Working rights included if useful
Consistent formatting
No spelling or grammar errors
No unexplained major gaps where context is needed
No outdated or irrelevant information taking up space
A clear connection to the role you are applying for
Then ask the most important question:
Would a busy recruiter understand my fit within 30 seconds?
If the answer is no, keep editing.
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