Most executives who move to Australia do not send a bad resume. They send a good resume written for somewhere else — and it reads, immediately and unmistakably, as an import.

The differences are not cosmetic. Length, paper size, spelling and register all sit at different settings here, and a search consultant registers all four before reading a word of your career history. Here is what actually changes.

Australian documents run longer, not shorter

This is the difference that costs the most, and it runs in the opposite direction to what most people expect.

The one-page rule is American. It applies to graduates and early-career candidates in the United States, and it has been repeated online so often that senior people arriving here try to compress twenty-five years into a single page. The result reads as a summary of a career rather than a case for a role.

In Australia, an executive document of three to seven pages is unremarkable. We routinely write five for a general manager or C-suite candidate, and more where a career spans several sectors or carries directorships, and search firms read all of it. What matters is not length but whether every page earns its place: scope, budget, headcount, P&L, and the outcomes attached to each.

Cut a senior Australian resume to one page and you strip out precisely the evidence that qualifies you.

A4, not Letter

The unglamorous one, and the one nobody mentions.

Australia uses A4 — 210 × 297 mm. The United States and Canada use Letter — 216 × 279 mm. A document set up in Letter and opened here will reflow: margins shift, line breaks move, carefully balanced pages develop an orphaned line at the bottom, and a two-page section becomes three.

If you built your resume in the US, open the page setup and change it before you do anything else. It takes ten seconds and it is the difference between a document that looks considered and one that looks like it was forwarded from another country.

Australian English, consistently

Australian English follows British conventions: organisation, specialise, recognise, analyse, centre, favour, licence as a noun and license as a verb.

Two things matter more than knowing the rules.

The first is consistency. A document that mixes organization and specialise looks unproofed, and at executive level a reader treats an error as a data point about how you work rather than a slip.

The second is that your software will not do this for you by default. Microsoft Word and Google Docs both ship set to US English, and both will quietly correct your Australian spelling to American as you type. Set the proofing language to English (Australia) on the whole document, then run the check again from the start.

No photograph

Australian resumes do not carry a photograph. Neither do British, American or Canadian ones.

This surprises candidates arriving from Germany, France, much of Asia and parts of the Middle East, where a professional headshot is standard and its absence looks careless. Here the convention runs the other way: a photograph on an Australian resume looks either naive or faintly presumptuous, and many organisations have recruitment policies that discourage photographs precisely because they invite bias.

The same applies to date of birth, marital status, nationality and any identity number. Leave all of it off. Your name, mobile, email and LinkedIn URL are sufficient, and a suburb and state if you want to signal you are local.

The register is quieter

This is the hardest difference to explain and the one that most often undoes an otherwise strong document.

American executive resumes are written to sell. Superlatives, transformational language, first-person declarations of visionary leadership — that register is normal there and reads as confidence. Sent to an Australian search consultant, it reads as overclaiming, and it triggers scepticism rather than interest.

Australian executive documents make the same claims by presenting the evidence and letting the reader draw the conclusion. Not “a visionary transformational leader who revolutionised operations” but “lifted on-time-in-full from 78 to 96 per cent across nine sites without adding headcount.” The second is a stronger claim. It is simply not making it about itself.

If you are arriving from the US market, this is usually the biggest single edit: keep every achievement, delete every adjective in front of it.

What does not change: the document still has to be read by software

Whichever country you are applying in, most large employers screen through an applicant tracking system before a person sees anything.

That is why tables, text boxes, side bars, columns and header or footer content cause problems — not because they look unprofessional, but because parsers read them badly or not at all. A two-column layout with your skills in a side bar will frequently arrive as an unreadable jumble, and the reader never knows what they missed.

Australia is no different here. A clean single-column structure, real headings, and dates in a consistent format will survive the systems that decide whether your five well-written pages are ever opened.

Going the other way

If you are Australian and applying overseas, the same list runs in reverse.

Shorten for the United States — two pages for most senior roles, and expect the reader to apply the one-page instinct even when they say otherwise. Reset the page size to Letter. Switch the proofing language. Keep the evidence-led register, which travels perfectly well, but recognise that a US reader may expect more explicit framing of your seniority than an Australian one would.

For continental Europe, check the local convention on photographs and personal details before assuming Australian norms apply. For the UK, you can send your Australian document largely unchanged; the conventions are close enough that only the page size and a small amount of market-specific framing need attention.

The short version

Everything else — clear structure, quantified achievements, a document that a parser can read — is the same everywhere and is where most of the work actually goes.

How does yours read to an Australian search consultant?

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