Avoid These 5 Things on Your Resume

Five things, and then one thing everybody tells you to cut that you should keep.

1. A photo, a date of birth, and your street address

The date of birth and the street address come off every time. The photo comes off almost every time, and the exception is narrower than people hope.

This is not an Australian idiosyncrasy. USAJOBS instructs American applicants not to include “Photos of yourself” or “Personal information, such as age, sex, religious affiliation, etc.” Acas tells British employers to “avoid asking for the applicant’s age or date of birth” on an application form (Age discrimination: key points for the workplace, February 2019, updated April 2024). In Victoria, the obligation runs to the employer: it is unlawful “to request information from applicants that could be used to discriminate against them, unless you can show that you need that information for a non-discriminatory purpose” (Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, Guideline for the recruitment industry and employers, September 2014).

A photograph hands a reader your age, your race and your gender before they have read a word about your work, and it hands the employer exactly the problem VEOHRC describes: information they cannot lawfully use and now cannot prove they did not use. That is the default, and it holds for almost every executive role in the country.

The exception is a role where physical presentation is part of the job — some sales, front-of-house, presenting and on-camera work, where the employer is assessing something a photograph legitimately shows. If you cannot make that argument about the specific role in front of you, leave it off. Either way your LinkedIn profile carries a photograph, which is where a reader goes looking.

Suburb and state is enough for an address. A full street address is an invitation to a commute judgement you will never get to answer, and no one is posting you anything.

2. Referees who have not been briefed

Whether the names go on the page at all is a judgement, not a rule, and anyone who tells you otherwise is repeating something they read.

Leaving them off buys you control. You get to brief the referee — on the role, on the organisation, on what the panel will probe — before the phone rings, and you decide when the conversation happens. Putting them on can buy you something too, particularly at executive level, where a referee the reader already knows and rates does more work than any line you could write about yourself. “Referees available on request” sits between the two: it costs a line and signals the omission was deliberate rather than an oversight. All three are defensible. We use all three, depending on the person and the role.

What is never defensible is a name and a mobile number belonging to someone who does not yet know they are a referee. That is the actual mistake, and it is common. The call comes at 4pm on a Tuesday, your former chair is caught cold, and the reference is lukewarm for no reason other than surprise.

Ask first. Then brief them. Then decide whether the names go on the page.

Government applications remove the choice. The Australian Public Service Commission’s guidance says your CV should include “the name and contact details of referees who can validate and support your application”, and that you should flag any sensitivity about when they are contacted. If you are applying to an APS role, put them on.

3. Your secondary schooling

Once you hold a tertiary qualification and a real career, the school leaves.

The usual justification is that most jobs now require a degree. In Australia they do not. In the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Survey of Education and Work — run each May alongside the Labour Force Survey — 34% of people aged 15–74 held a bachelor degree or above, and 64% held a non-school qualification of any kind (Education and Work, Australia, May 2025, released 19 November 2025). Plenty of Australian work does not need a degree, and plenty of Australian executives do not have one.

The blunter reason is that in Australia a school name is a class signal. In Sydney and Melbourne especially, a reader who knows the schools will read your fees, your postcode and your parents off that one line. None of it bears on whether you can run their business, and you never get to answer a conclusion nobody says out loud.

It also dates you, and tells a reader nothing about the last twenty years.

4. Internal acronyms and employer-specific jargon

Every large organisation grows a private language. Programme names, system names, internal grades, three-letter units that meant something to four thousand people and nothing to anyone else.

A search consultant reading “led the ODP transition across BU3 and BU4” learns that you were busy. Write what it was and what changed: “merged two operating divisions, 900 staff, onto one operating model in eleven months.”

The test is whether a competent reader who has never worked at your employer can tell what you did. If they cannot, the line is decoration.

5. Anything you could not defend in a reference call

Outright lies end careers here. Australia is a small market and the same twenty people sit on the same boards.

The subtler version is the number you cannot evidence. “Delivered $40m in savings” is a great line until a former CFO is asked about it and says the programme was scoped at $40m and landed at $12m. Every figure you write is a figure you may be asked to substantiate by someone who was there.

Write the ones you can stand behind. They are more persuasive anyway, because they carry the qualifications that invented numbers never do.

And one thing to keep

Your not-for-profit board seat. Your committee work. The industry association you chair.

The stock advice says cut hobbies and interests, and for “enjoys reading and travel” that is right. But at executive and board level, unpaid governance work is not a hobby — it is evidence of governance experience, of networks, and of the appetite to serve. A chair recruiting a first-time non-executive director is looking for exactly that. Cutting it to save four lines is the wrong trade.

Keep it if it is current and if it is real. Drop it if you resigned in 2016.

A myth to stop obeying

The advice to choose an “ATS-friendly font” has no mechanism behind it. A parser reads the text layer of a file — the characters, not the shapes drawn on the page. That is why a CV scanned to an image parses to nothing while the same document exported properly parses cleanly, and it is also why the typeface is not the variable anyone thinks it is. In nearly ten years of putting client documents through these systems, we have never seen an outcome turn on the font.

Choose a face for the human being who will read it: 10 to 12 point, one family, consistent sizes.

What we would do

Take a printed copy and a red pen to your own CV, and mark every line that survives only because it has always been there. Personal details you would not volunteer in an interview, referees, school, acronyms, numbers you cannot source.

Then count what is left. If cutting all of it costs you less than half a page, the problem was never the length.

If you would rather someone else made those calls, having made them a few thousand times, that is our AI-Enhanced Executive Resume:

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Sources: USAJOBS Help Center, What to include in your resume (accessed 17 August 2026). Acas, Age discrimination: key points for the workplace, February 2019, updated April 2024. Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, Guideline for the recruitment industry and employers, 2nd edition, September 2014. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Education and Work, Australia, reference period May 2025, released 19 November 2025. This is a sample survey — the Survey of Education and Work, conducted each May as a supplement to the monthly Labour Force Survey — not the Census. It is the final release of that series, which the ABS has marked as ceased. Australian Public Service Commission, Applying for an APS job (Cracking the Code), apsc.gov.au (read at source 18 August 2026, referee wording confirmed verbatim).
Most recent source consulted: 18 August 2026 (ABS release and APSC guidance both re-checked at source on that date).