7 Resume Trends That Transform Your Job Search
7 resume trends for 2021.
This time last year, we shared our top 6 Resume Trends to Watch Out for in 2020, thinking it would be a regular year.
Oops.
Instead, in a year that could have been lifted straight out of dystopian science fiction, a global pandemic chased us all into our houses; 909 Australians died from coronavirus; and (what feels like a decade ago) bushfires burned through 47 million acres of land.
Plus, even as businesses fast-tracked their digital transformations and instilled work-from-home practices in every department, they also cut loyal employees. Qantas slashed 8,500 jobs, Deloitte cut 700 positions, and Myer temporarily closed all its stores to stand down 10,000 people. In total, 600,000 people lost their jobs in April alone.
With everything transforming around us, it comes as no surprise that the way you write your resume is vastly different heading into 2021 compared to 12 months ago. And the first thing you should address are these 7 resume trends for 2021 that have emerged in the wake of 2020.
- Include achievements during COVID-19
It’s understandable if the first thing you want to do is banish all signs of 2020 from your resume, but unfortunately it’s essential information and number 1 in our 7 resume trends for 2021.
Any special COVID-19 achievements should be detailed at length in your resume. For example, suppose you helped your business adjust to work-from-home practices by assisting in remote management processes. That’s a highly relevant and impressive achievement that should go near the top of your resume:
- Maintained excellent employee engagement rates above 80 per cent during COVID-19 by rapidly proposing and implementing new remote management practices.
Of course, even if you didn’t accomplish anything spectacular, the truth is your efforts were probably more important than you think.
One of the biggest problems businesses faced this year concerned their culture. Stress about catching coronavirus was only the beginning. Financial pressure, poor sleep patterns, favourite co-workers getting laid off, only seeing family members over FaceTime — it all adds up.
In situations like these, maintaining strong teamwork was worth more than anything. If you’ve been someone that other team members leaned on during the pandemic, it’s a great accomplishment to mention. Of course, you can make it sound a little more formal for your resume:
- Was a good teammate during COVID-19;
versus
- Oversaw crisis management for the team, maintaining a positive team culture during COVID-19.
- Or add your courses during COVID-19 instead
If you rack your brains and still can’t think of an achievement you pulled off during COVID-19, don’t worry. The easiest thing to talk about was how you boosted your career development with an online course or something similar. Flag it in your Professional Summary or covering letter for bonus points.
But don’t think you need to fork out tens of thousands of dollars to enrol in a Go8 university just for the course. With the rise of online learning, some of the most reputable organisations in the world are offering free or cost-effective courses that take less than 10 hours — including Google, HubSpot, TAFE NSW, TAFE Vic, Khan Academy, Open Culture, and many others.
Adding a few of these qualifications can be an appealing way to show companies how employable you are.
On the other hand, if all you did was sink into your couch and watch Netflix all day … well, at least you still have some time to remedy that. Most businesses are still working from home, so you can still bolster your resume with a short online course in the new year.
- Don’t worry about explaining a 2020 redundancy or career gap
Even in a regular year, you should never explain a redundancy in the resume. Even if your reason is convincing, it’s still irrelevant:
- Made redundant after role was automated.
However, if there’s one positive for jobseekers heading into 2021, it’s that you don’t need to do much explaining at all about losing your job. If you were working for Virgin Australia, the whole nation knows your company went into voluntary administration in April. Even the most heartless Hiring Manager isn’t going to hold it against you that you were unlucky enough to be in the industry hit hardest by the pandemic.
A ton of intelligent, accomplished, meaningful employees lost their jobs this year. So even if you were terminated from your position this year, you can produce your resume with full confidence that you’re still a strong asset to a company.
- Update your LinkedIn in line with new changes
We sound like a dead horse, but LinkedIn only becomes more and more popular each year. In fact, with everyone locked at home, LinkedIn reported a 50 per cent increase in shared content on its website this year. We wrote at length about the most relevant changes here.
The short story?
It’s safe to say, if you don’t have LinkedIn in 2021, you’re well behind the eight-ball in your job search. Your competitors are positioning themselves as thought leaders with hundreds or even thousands of LinkedIn followers, daily Story updates, dynamic Events and Interests feeds, and the new ‘My Company’ page. If you don’t know what these are yet — head over to our comprehensive LinkedIn Insights article to see what the fuss is about.
Plus, the basics of LinkedIn are still essential. Your About section, headline, and role descriptions are essential information that make or break your LinkedIn page.
In particular, with greater competition, your headline is the first thing recruiters see, so make sure it’s both specific for your role while being eye-catching enough to seize attention. Here’s an example of a poor, generic LinkedIn headline:
Marketing Coordinator passionate about the construction industry
And here’s an example of a much more effective headline:
Marketing Coordinator (Construction) | Grew Facebook Ads ROI by 3.5x
- Elevate your achievements with action words
In the equivalent section last year, we talked about how important it is to quantify your achievements. That’s the traditional wisdom that’s been repeated over and over in every resume writing guide published since the dawn of time.
So are numbers less important in 2021?
No — in fact, it’s still best if you know how to quantify your accomplishments. However, in a year where everything nosedived, even treading water was a great achievement. So if you didn’t grow your revenue by 30 per cent like a madman because you were somehow even more productive during COVID-19 than usual, that’s okay.
An achievement like this is very impressive:
- Protected revenue streams with a minimal decline during COVID-19.
But actually quantifying and making this achievement specific can make it look less impressive:
- Protected revenue streams and only lost four clients during COVID-19.
As soon as you quantify those ‘four clients,’ you’re bringing attention to your failures. However, if you keep it more vague, you keep the attention on your actual achievement — ‘protect[ing] revenue streams.’
- Record a video resume in advance
Video resumes, as we wrote about earlier this year, are one of the most innovative ways you can boost your application.
The way to use them is definitely as a complement rather than a replacement for your traditional text-based resume. You send them along to the Hiring Manager at the first opportunity, such as before you have your first interview.
In short, video resumes offer some amazing advantages. They show your personality, display your video editing and tech skills, and offer a competitive advantage over most job seekers who don’t use one.
But don’t be too enamoured with them — the biggest problem with video resumes is how they offer the chance for companies to discriminate against you. If you believe you’re someone who gets less opportunities because of age, sex, race, ethnicity, or anything else, don’t feel obligated to submit your video resume.
Otherwise, a video resume can only boost your job search when complementing your traditional text resume. Companies love to hire for culture fit, and your text resumes have always been more about achievements, successes, and responsibilities than your personality. Preparing an additional video resume to send along can seriously elevate your application.
- Consider using a professional resume writing services agency
Job searches have become more competitive, more brutal, and more likely to end in failure in 2020, and that’s likely to continue next year. With more people out of a job — and extremely talented people at that — applicants per job are well above pre-coronavirus levels. That means job seekers need to beat out more competitors to successfully land a suitable position.
Unfortunately, a lot of talented people without professional resume writers behind them aren’t even getting interviews.
Executive Agents, for example, uses a professional design team to optimise your resume template for ATS — applicant tracking systems. If you don’t have your resume optimised, chances are you won’t even get past the machine that automatically rejects almost 90 per cent of applicants.
Executive Agents is a 100 per cent Australian company with all employees in Australia. We’re also constantly innovating in the face of cutting-edge changes in the recruitment sector, such as LinkedIn, ATS, and COVID-19 trends.
If you’re looking to update your resume to land your dream job in 2021, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a free 15-minute consultation today.
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6 Pros and Cons of Video Resumes
Video resumes present valuable strengths (it shows your personality, displays your video editing skills, and offers a competitive advantage) while suffering from significant drawbacks (it doesn’t give a full picture of your career, doesn’t show your writing skills, and allows for discrimination).
4 Best Ways to Leverage Social Media as an Executive
People trust the organisation they work for more than they trust almost anything else. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer puts trust in “my employer” at 78 per cent — fourteen points ahead of business generally and twenty-five ahead of government — and 73 per cent of people expect the chief executive to lead the work of bridging divides.
Turning up is no longer the hard part. As at 2024, 74 per cent of Fortune 500 chief executives had a presence on at least one social platform, and 98 per cent of those who did were on LinkedIn. Being there is table stakes. Being worth reading is not. Here are four ways to leverage social media as an executive, generating awareness for both your company and your personal brand.
1. Make sure to react and comment
There’s a reason this is number one. It’s easy to believe social media for executives is all about posting how-to articles and generating awareness, but like many things in life, social media starts from what you’re doing for other people.
So make sure you react and comment on other people’s posts! It’s the building block of everything else you do on social media. The best thing is, reacting and commenting is the most time-efficient thing you can do on social media. To research, plan, and publish an article, you need to block out at least a couple of hours. To read someone else’s post and write a thoughtful comment, though, takes about 10 minutes. It’s even easier if you found a friend posted an image.
It’s important that your comments are genuine, but don’t be harsh—if you think someone is an awful writer who knows nothing about their industry, don’t write a critical comment. In fact, as an executive, try not to write anything critical at all. Your criticism holds significant weight, and leaving a bad comment on social media is like criticising someone in public. Reserve your criticism for face-to-face interactions.
2. Write articles based on your experience and problems
Once you’ve reacted and commented on other people’s work, they’re much more likely to read your stuff. But how do you begin? It’s easy to look at someone else’s budding LinkedIn or Medium account with 100,000+ followers and get discouraged that you’ll never reach that level.
Like always, the trick is to think small. You can’t win a premiership in one go—you have to build it up with every training session. And to write a good article, you have to start in bite-sized parts. Don’t worry about article structure or getting readers or SEO; it’s too complicated to worry about at the start.
Instead, try writing about the problems you faced as an individual or team. For example, Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva, wrote a very long LinkedIn article detailing some of the problems she faced while creating her startups Fusion Books and Canva. She mentions that when she and her then-boyfriend Cliff Obrecht — now her husband, and Canva’s chief operating officer — were starting Fusion Books, some clients would ask to speak to the manager. Since it was a two-person job with no manager, ‘Cliff would pause a moment and change voices.’
It’s personal details like this that make you seem more trustworthy and authentic as an executive on social media.
(Of course, writing articles is never that easy. And before you build a plan around whichever format is currently being recommended to you, it is worth knowing that most LinkedIn trends are not worth chasing.)
3. Don’t be perfect, but be careful
The best thing about social media is that it makes everyone seem human. That goes for executives, political leaders, celebrities, athletes, and more. And if you want to be human, you’re not meant to be perfect.
Apart from personal details, the other great thing about Melanie’s article is that she’s vulnerable. While she’s chief executive of a company last valued at US$42 billion, in her article she writes about her fears, insecurities, failures, and the times she thought she wasn’t good enough. People are just people, no matter if you’re old or young or rich or poor, no matter what gender or race.
On social media, you shouldn’t try to be the perfect CEO or managing director, you should just be yourself. Something as simple as sharing a favourite breakfast meal can help generate employee engagement. Your team members could be thinking, My boss eats Weet-Bix at 7am just like I do.
But everyone’s heard horror stories of people sending the wrong Tweet and getting fired the next day, and as an executive, the heat on your shoulders is only magnified. Who knows, maybe you evade taxes, and your Weet-Bix photo accidentally includes incriminating evidence. Apart from trying to be a better person regarding the illegal stuff, the best thing to do is to get someone else to check every social media post you make. (You’re an executive; this absolutely isn’t over the top.) You can either turn it over to a trusted friend, a dedicated employee, or you can …
4. Deal with what is already out there
It’s a headache, we get it. Even if you can write witty comments, post advice articles that generate tens of thousands of reads, and snap photos like a true professional—you still have to devote lots of time, because social media awareness doesn’t happen by itself.
And there’s the part nobody plans for: everything already online with your name on it. An abandoned profile. A bio on a former employer’s site still listing a job you left years ago. A conference programme, a photograph from a decade ago, a comment thread you had forgotten. At executive level you are searched before you are shortlisted and again before an offer, and that results page gets read as evidence.
That is the work our Online Reputation Management service does — an audit of what a hiring panel actually sees, consistency between your profiles and your resume, and the stale material that can be updated, removed, or simply out-ranked. It is scoped per engagement rather than sold from a rate card, because for some people it is an afternoon of tidying and for others it is not. We have worked with senior leaders from Telstra, EY, Deloitte and Woolworths, among others.
Besides, if you’re not carrying the safety and the housekeeping, you can focus on just having fun—which is one of the best parts of social media. Yes, social media is fast becoming part of the executive job, but it shouldn’t be a chore like administrative activities. If you’re having fun and being genuine, your social media influence will surely be more effective.
Figures checked 19 August 2026. Trust in employer and expectations of chief executives: 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, released 18 January 2026 (fieldwork 23 October – 18 November 2025, almost 34,000 respondents across 28 countries). Fortune 500 chief executives on social media: Influential Executive, 2024 data, updated 28 February 2025 — no later edition has been published. Canva valued at US$42bn at its August 2025 employee share sale, still the figure reported in June 2026.
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Getting Hired When Over 50
Ensuring that you’re employable after age 50 does not require any unusual tactics, just some special attention to the skillset you possess and how you market it to an employer. In this sense, getting hired after 50 does not mean any drastic changes to the strategies you used when getting your first job.
8 Mistakes People Make on LinkedIn
Eight things that make a LinkedIn profile look neglected — from the empty About section to the visibility settings worth changing before you start rewriting.
How to know it’s time to move jobs.
Life is too short! Don’t waste your life away in a dead-end job any longer! The world is full of amazing opportunities and don’t let them get away. Here are some tell-tale signs that it’s time to pack-up the desk and get your life moving again.
- You’re bored all the time.
- You feel that your skills aren’t being fully utilised.
- Your boss’s vision for you is very different from your own.
- You can’t work effectively with your boss.
- Nothing you do is ever right.
- You’re not growing or getting developed.
- You feel you cannot be your authentic self anymore.
- You’re not being paid a reasonable salary.
- Signs layoffs are coming (see our article on this).
- You can’t picture yourself staying with the company in the future.
- You can’t trust your boss and the leadership team.
- You can’t find motivation. No matter how hard you try.
- Thinking about work triggers anxious feelings.
Is it time for you to move jobs?
TAKE OUR FREE 5-QUESTION PACKAGE FINDER.
How I became an MD before 30
Being promoted to managing director level in your 20s may seem like an impossible notion. In reality it does happen, and, contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t happen to geniuses or those who “got a lucky break”. We’ve interviewed the people that have made it happen for them and these are some of the most common pointers they offered:
- Recognise that nothing goes to plan: Just because things are going bad this year, does not mean they will next year. Things change quickly, nothing stays the same forever.
- Don’t accept whatever at bonus times. Stop being a pushover. Speak to Executive Agents to have yourself setup POWERFULLY for such discussions.
- You only get what you ask for.
- Acknowledge that you are your own worst critic
- You matter. Come from an empowered context. For example, not speaking in meetings because you don’t think your opinion matters is a disempowering context and will get you nowhere.
- Don’t be too obsessed with just impressing your boss. Get to the source of the substance of what you’re actually trying to do is more important than just getting it done.
- Learn to trust yourself.
- Don’t wait! Build the systems and habits that can change your life.
Have you got what it takes to be a managing director before 30?
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