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Create ResumeIf your resume keeps attracting the wrong jobs, the problem usually is not the job market. It is the message your resume is sending. In the Australian job market, recruiters and hiring managers make quick decisions based on patterns: your job titles, keywords, achievements, seniority signals, industry language, and the type of value you appear to offer. If those signals point towards roles you no longer want, your resume will keep pulling you backwards. A resume does not simply describe your past. It positions you for your next move. When it reads like a history document instead of a positioning document, you become searchable, visible, and attractive for the wrong opportunities.
Most candidates think their resume attracts the wrong jobs because recruiters are not reading properly. Sometimes that is true. Let’s not pretend every recruiter reads with the calm focus of a forensic investigator. Many are moving quickly, scanning profiles under pressure, and matching what they see against a role brief.
But often, the resume is giving them the wrong conclusion.
Your resume might be telling recruiters:
You are more junior than you actually are
You are more operational than strategic
You are more administrative than commercial
You are more technical than client facing
You are more generalist than specialist
You are more suited to your old role than your target role
A resume should be grounded in your experience, but it should not be trapped inside your past job description.
This is where many candidates go wrong. They write a resume as if the goal is to document everything they have done. That feels responsible, but hiring does not work that way. Hiring teams are not reading your resume to admire the full archive of your career. They are trying to answer one practical question:
Can this person solve the problem we are hiring for?
If your resume mostly describes responsibilities from previous roles, you are relying on the reader to interpret your potential. That is risky because recruiters and hiring managers rarely have time to do that much translation.
For example, if you are trying to move from administrative support into operations coordination, but your resume is full of diary management, inbox handling, meeting minutes, and travel booking, recruiters will keep seeing you as an administrator. Even if you have been improving processes, coordinating vendors, managing internal workflows, and solving operational issues behind the scenes, those points need to be visible.
Your resume should not lie about your experience. It should select and frame your experience around the direction you want to go next.
That is not manipulation. That is positioning.
You are looking for the same work again, even when you are not
That is the uncomfortable truth: recruiters respond to the evidence in front of them. If your resume is full of tasks from roles you want to move away from, those are the roles you will keep being contacted about.
I see this constantly. A candidate says, “I keep getting approached for the wrong jobs.” Then I look at their resume and it is built entirely around the work they are trying to escape. No wonder the market is confused. The resume is acting like a signpost pointing in the wrong direction.
Recruiters search databases, LinkedIn, job boards, and applicant tracking systems using keywords. In Australia, this is common across agency recruitment, internal recruitment, volume hiring, government recruitment, corporate hiring, and specialist search.
If your resume is loaded with keywords from roles you do not want, you are making yourself easier to find for those roles.
This is one of the most overlooked reasons candidates attract the wrong jobs.
For example, if your resume heavily repeats terms like:
Customer service
Data entry
Administration
Scheduling
Reception
Call centre
Accounts payable
Payroll support
Retail sales
Manual testing
Help desk support
Then recruiters searching for those skills may find you, even if you are trying to move into team leadership, operations, business analysis, project coordination, HR, account management, or another direction.
The issue is not that these skills are bad. The issue is that keywords create visibility. If the wrong words dominate your resume, the wrong roles will find you first.
This does not mean removing all evidence of your background. It means changing the weighting. Your resume needs to give more space to the skills, outcomes, tools, stakeholders, responsibilities, and achievements that match your target roles.
A simple recruiter test is this: if I scanned only the top third of your resume, would I immediately understand what type of role you want next?
If the answer is no, your resume is making the market guess. And the market is not always generous with guesses.
A vague professional summary is one of the fastest ways to attract irrelevant roles.
Many resumes open with something like:
Weak Example:
“Hardworking and motivated professional with strong communication skills and experience across fast paced environments. Able to work independently and as part of a team.”
This sounds harmless, but it says almost nothing. It could belong to a receptionist, retail assistant, project coordinator, team leader, graduate, office manager, customer service officer, or operations assistant. When your opening summary is this broad, recruiters do not get a positioning signal. They just move into the work history and decide based on your previous titles.
That is usually where the wrong roles come from.
A stronger summary should clarify:
The type of professional you are
The level you operate at
The industries or environments you understand
The problems you solve
The value you bring
The direction of your next move, where appropriate
Good Example:
“Operations and customer experience professional with experience improving service workflows, coordinating internal teams, and resolving process gaps across high volume environments. Known for bringing structure to messy operational issues, supporting frontline teams, and improving the way customer problems are handled from intake through to resolution.”
That version does not just say “I have experience”. It tells the recruiter how to understand the candidate.
A strong summary is not a motivational statement. It is a positioning tool.
Job titles carry weight. Sometimes too much weight.
Recruiters scan titles first because titles give fast context. Hiring managers do the same. This can work in your favour when your title matches your target role. It can work against you when your title undersells your actual responsibility or anchors you to the wrong career level.
In Australia, job titles are not always consistent between companies. A “Coordinator” in one business may be doing work closer to a manager. A “Manager” in another business may have no direct reports. A “Consultant” could mean sales, advisory, recruitment, customer success, technology implementation, or something else entirely.
The problem is that recruiters still use titles as shortcuts.
If your title is likely to be misunderstood, your resume needs to add context quickly. You can do this without inflating the title.
For example:
Weak Example:
Customer Service Officer
Handled inbound calls and customer enquiries.
Good Example:
Customer Service Officer
Supported high volume customer operations for a national service team, resolving escalated enquiries, identifying recurring process issues, and coordinating with operations, billing, and field teams to improve response times.
The title is the same, but the positioning is completely different.
If your title is attracting roles beneath your actual capability, the answer is not to fake a better title. The answer is to frame the scope, complexity, stakeholders, and outcomes more clearly.
A resume that lists duties attracts roles based on duties. A resume that shows outcomes attracts roles based on capability.
This is where candidates often accidentally undersell themselves. They include what they were responsible for, but not what changed because they were there.
Hiring managers want evidence. Recruiters look for proof that your experience is not just passive exposure. They want to see what you improved, influenced, built, fixed, reduced, increased, coordinated, implemented, led, streamlined, saved, resolved, or delivered.
But the evidence needs to match the jobs you actually want.
If you want leadership roles, your resume needs evidence of leadership, not just technical delivery.
If you want project roles, your resume needs evidence of timelines, stakeholders, risks, coordination, documentation, delivery, and problem solving.
If you want commercial roles, your resume needs evidence of revenue, retention, customer value, negotiation, pipeline, account growth, market insight, or business impact.
If you want operations roles, your resume needs evidence of process improvement, workflow management, resource planning, service delivery, compliance, quality, or efficiency.
The mistake is not only failing to include achievements. It is including achievements that reinforce the wrong direction.
For example, a candidate trying to move out of customer service might proudly list:
Answered 80 inbound calls per day
Maintained strong customer satisfaction scores
Resolved customer complaints quickly
Those are good points, but they still position the candidate for more customer service. If the target is operations coordination, the resume should lean into different evidence:
Identified recurring enquiry patterns and shared process improvement recommendations with the operations team
Coordinated follow up actions between customer service, logistics, and billing to reduce unresolved cases
Created tracking notes that helped the team manage escalations more consistently
Same background. Different signal.
That is the difference between describing your job and positioning your career.
A general resume feels safe. It gives the impression that you are keeping your options open.
In reality, it often weakens your application.
Australian employers usually hire for a specific problem, not a vague collection of transferable skills. Even when a job ad says they want someone adaptable, flexible, proactive, and able to wear many hats, they still have a core problem underneath the polite language.
They may need someone who can:
Stabilise a messy team
Improve reporting accuracy
Reduce customer complaints
Manage competing stakeholders
Support a system implementation
Bring structure to operations
Handle a backlog
Improve sales conversion
Strengthen compliance
Lift service standards
If your resume says you can do a bit of everything, the hiring manager may not see enough evidence that you can solve their particular problem.
This is especially important in competitive Australian markets like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, and remote hiring pools where employers are comparing candidates quickly. A broad resume often loses to a more focused resume, even when the broader candidate has stronger overall experience.
That sounds unfair, but it is how screening works. The clearer candidate is easier to move forward.
A resume should not try to appeal to everyone. It should appeal strongly to the right roles.
This is probably the most common issue I see when candidates want to change direction.
They are tired of certain responsibilities, but their resume is built around those exact responsibilities.
For example:
A teacher trying to move into learning design fills the resume with classroom management instead of curriculum development, stakeholder communication, assessment design, and learning outcomes
A retail manager trying to move into operations focuses on rosters and store presentation instead of workforce planning, stock control, process improvement, compliance, and performance coaching
An executive assistant trying to move into project coordination focuses on diary management instead of stakeholder coordination, timelines, documentation, risk tracking, and cross functional follow up
A help desk analyst trying to move into cyber security focuses on ticket resolution instead of access control, incident patterns, risk awareness, documentation, and system monitoring
The market will believe what you emphasise.
This is where candidates sometimes get nervous. They ask, “But shouldn’t I include everything?”
No. You should include what is relevant.
A resume is not a confession. It is not a complete legal transcript of every task you have performed. It is a targeted career document. You can be honest and selective at the same time.
The practical question is not “Did I do this?” The better question is “Does this help position me for the role I want?”
If the answer is no, reduce it, reframe it, or remove it.
Sometimes the issue is not your experience. It is the missing explanation.
Recruiters become cautious when a resume looks like a mismatch. Not because they are trying to be difficult, but because they need to understand whether the application makes sense.
If you are applying for roles that are slightly different from your previous path, your resume needs to explain the bridge.
This matters when you are:
Changing industries
Moving from hands on delivery into leadership
Moving from operations into strategy
Moving from technical roles into business facing roles
Returning after a career break
Moving from contract work into permanent roles
Moving from small business environments into corporate roles
Moving from overseas experience into the Australian job market
When the bridge is missing, recruiters may make assumptions.
They may think you applied randomly. They may think you are overqualified. They may think you will get bored. They may think you are not serious about the move. They may think you do not understand the role.
This is where the top third of your resume matters. Your summary, key skills, recent achievements, and first role description should work together to show why your target move makes sense.
You do not need a dramatic career story. You need enough context for the reader to understand the logic.
For example:
“I am targeting operations coordinator roles because my strongest work has been coordinating internal workflows, resolving service delivery issues, improving documentation, and helping teams work more consistently across high volume environments.”
That kind of clarity helps recruiters place you correctly.
Many candidates write bullet points by copying the style of job ads. The result is a resume full of phrases like:
Responsible for stakeholder management
Managed competing priorities
Worked in a fast paced environment
Supported business operations
Demonstrated strong communication skills
Ensured compliance with policies and procedures
These phrases are not necessarily wrong, but they are weak when they stand alone. They sound like position descriptions, not evidence.
Hiring managers do not just want to know what category of work you did. They want to understand how you handled it.
There is a big difference between:
Weak Example:
“Managed stakeholders across the business.”
And:
Good Example:
“Coordinated priorities between sales, operations, and finance teams to resolve customer onboarding delays and improve handover accuracy.”
The second version shows context, stakeholders, problem solving, and outcome. It gives the recruiter something real to work with.
The problem with generic resume language is that it creates generic job matches. If your resume could describe thousands of people, it will not attract precise opportunities.
Specificity is what helps the right employer recognise you.
Recruiters are not only screening for skills. They are screening for level.
This is where many resumes quietly fail.
Two candidates can both say they managed projects, supported stakeholders, improved processes, or led teams. But the hiring decision depends on the scale and complexity of that work.
For example:
Did you support 5 stakeholders or 50?
Was the budget $10,000 or $2 million?
Were you working locally, nationally, or across multiple regions?
Did you lead one person, a team, a vendor group, or cross functional stakeholders?
Were you following a process or building one?
Were you solving routine issues or ambiguous business problems?
Were you contributing to decisions or making them?
If your resume does not show scope, recruiters may place you at the wrong level.
This is especially common with candidates who are modest or who work in organisations where everyone is expected to “just get on with it”. Australian workplace culture can sometimes reward understatement internally, but your resume cannot rely on understatement. Hiring teams outside your current workplace do not know how much you were carrying.
You do not need to exaggerate. You do need to give enough context.
A stronger resume includes signals like:
Team size
Customer volume
Revenue impact
Budget responsibility
Geographic coverage
System complexity
Stakeholder seniority
Project scale
Compliance environment
Decision making authority
These details help recruiters understand whether you belong in a support role, senior individual contributor role, leadership role, specialist role, or management role.
Without them, they guess. And often, they guess too low.
A single resume can work if your target roles are closely related. It does not work well when you are applying across several different directions.
For example, one resume usually cannot strongly target all of these at once:
Operations coordinator
HR advisor
Project officer
Executive assistant
Customer success manager
Office manager
Business analyst
There may be transferable skills between them, but the positioning is different. The hiring manager for each role is looking for different evidence.
When candidates use one resume for too many job types, the document becomes diluted. It tries to include everything, so nothing feels sharp.
This creates a strange problem: the candidate may be capable of several roles, but the resume does not look compelling for any of them.
The fix is not necessarily writing a completely new resume every time. It is creating role direction versions.
For example, you might have:
A resume version for operations roles
A resume version for project coordination roles
A resume version for client facing account roles
A resume version for leadership roles
Each version should adjust the summary, key skills, achievement order, and bullet emphasis. The employment history can remain truthful and consistent, but the framing changes.
That is what strong candidates do well. They do not invent a new career for each application. They make the relevant part of their career easier to see.
When your resume attracts the wrong jobs, it helps to understand what happens on the recruiter side.
A recruiter does not usually sit there thinking deeply about your entire career potential. They are matching evidence to a brief.
During screening, they are asking:
Does this person match the role title or target background?
Have they done similar work recently?
Are the right keywords and responsibilities visible?
Does the level look right?
Does the industry context make sense?
Are there achievements that support the move?
Is the salary likely to align?
Will the hiring manager understand this profile quickly?
Is there a risk this person is applying for the wrong reason?
That last one matters more than candidates realise.
If your resume looks scattered, recruiters may worry that you are applying broadly because you are frustrated, uncertain, or desperate. That may not be true at all, but resumes create impressions quickly.
Hiring is not only about capability. It is also about confidence. A recruiter needs to feel confident presenting you. A hiring manager needs to feel confident shortlisting you. Your resume needs to reduce doubt, not create extra interpretation work.
This is why clear positioning matters. You are not just trying to get found. You are trying to be understood.
The best way to fix this is to audit your resume through the lens of your target role, not your entire career history.
Start by asking a blunt question:
“What job does this resume look like it is trying to get?”
Not what job you personally want. Not what you hope people will infer. What job does the document actually point towards?
Then review the resume section by section.
You cannot position a resume properly if you do not know the target.
You do not need one exact job title, but you do need a clear direction. For example:
Operations coordinator roles in service based businesses
HR advisor roles with employee relations exposure
Project officer roles in government or education
Customer success roles in SaaS or professional services
Marketing coordinator roles with content and campaign focus
Finance officer roles with reporting and reconciliations
The clearer the target, the easier it is to decide what belongs.
The top third should immediately tell the reader where to place you.
This includes:
Professional summary
Key skills
Core strengths
Most recent role headline
Selected achievements
Do not waste this space on generic traits. Use it to frame your value.
A recruiter should be able to scan the first section and think, “Right, I understand this candidate.”
Review your resume and highlight the words that appear most often. Then ask whether those words match the roles you want.
If the wrong keywords dominate, adjust the language.
For example, depending on your target role, you may need to increase emphasis on:
Stakeholder management
Process improvement
Project coordination
Reporting
Compliance
Team leadership
Account management
Operations support
Vendor coordination
Systems implementation
Use the language of your target role, but only where it genuinely reflects your experience.
You do not need to delete your background. You need to translate it.
For every role, ask:
What parts of this role support my next move?
What responsibilities should be reduced because they attract the wrong roles?
What achievements prove relevant capability?
What scope or complexity have I failed to show?
What problems did I solve that my target employer would care about?
This is where a resume becomes strategic. You are not changing the truth. You are changing the emphasis.
Some details are accurate but unhelpful.
If a task pulls you towards work you no longer want, it should not dominate the page.
For example, if you are moving away from administration, do not give six bullet points to admin tasks. Mention them briefly if needed, then shift focus to coordination, process, stakeholders, systems, reporting, or improvement.
The resume should not keep voting for your old career path.
Where possible, show the result of your work.
This does not always need numbers. Numbers help, but not every role has clean metrics. You can still show outcomes through:
Faster turnaround times
Reduced errors
Improved team consistency
Better stakeholder visibility
Smoother handovers
Stronger documentation
Better customer experience
Improved compliance
Fewer escalations
The point is to show value, not just activity.
You will know your resume positioning is improving when the opportunities become more aligned.
That does not mean every recruiter message will be perfect. Some irrelevant messages will always happen because database searching can be clumsy. But you should start seeing better patterns.
Good signs include:
Recruiters contact you about roles closer to your target direction
Hiring managers understand your background more quickly
Interviews focus on the work you actually want to discuss
You get fewer questions about why you applied
Your applications receive stronger responses from relevant roles
Your salary conversations align better with your level
Your resume feels less like a list of old duties and more like a case for your next move
The strongest sign is simple: people start describing you the way you want to be positioned.
That is what a good resume does. It gives the market the right language for your value.
If your resume is attracting the wrong jobs, do not just blame recruiters, job boards, ATS filters, or the Australian job market. Those things can absolutely be imperfect, and some hiring processes are more chaotic than employers like to admit. But your resume still has a job to do.
It needs to direct attention.
It needs to show the right evidence.
It needs to make your target role feel logical.
It needs to reduce the mental work required from recruiters and hiring managers.
The strongest resumes do not try to include everything. They make a clear argument: this is who I am professionally, this is the value I bring, and this is the type of role I am ready for next.
If your resume keeps attracting the wrong jobs, the market may not be misunderstanding you. Your resume may be explaining you badly.
Fix the signal, and the opportunities usually become much cleaner.
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.
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