How to Write a Resume in Australia in 2026

Six things make an Australian resume Australian. None of them is difficult.

• No photograph, unless the employer specifically asks for one.
• No date of birth, age, nationality, marital status or religion.
• Australian spelling: organise, specialise, centre, colour, licence (the noun) and license (the verb).
• Referees are a judgement, not a rule. Leaving them off buys you the chance to brief them before the phone rings; naming one the reader already rates can be worth more than anything you write about yourself. What is never right is listing someone who does not yet know they are a referee. Government applications remove the choice, and they are dealt with below.
• A personal email address, never your current or former employer’s.
• Two to three pages for most professional and management roles. An executive career commonly runs three to seven, decided by the career rather than by a rule.

Everything else is just resume writing, and most of it is the same in Auckland, Manchester or Toronto.

Why the personal details come off

Discrimination on the grounds of age, sex, race or disability in Australian recruitment is unlawful — the Age Discrimination Act 2004, the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, all Commonwealth. That is the law.

Here is the practice. AHRI’s Quarterly Australian Work Outlook for the March quarter 2026, drawn from 612 senior business decision makers surveyed between 2 and 13 January 2026, found that 19 per cent of employers would exclude candidates aged 55 and over from recruitment, and that almost seven in ten — 69 per cent — would exclude applicants on some characteristic or other. The AHRI and Australian Human Rights Commission Employing and Retaining Older Workers Survey (May 2023) found around one in six organisations actively excluded older workers, and that only a quarter of HR professionals were open “to a large extent” to hiring people aged 65 and over.

Employers will tell a confidential survey this. They will not tell you. A photograph and a date of birth hand over three filtering variables before anyone has read a line about your work. Leave them out. It costs you nothing and it removes the cheapest reason anyone has to stop reading.

The six-seconds thing

The number that appears in every article of this kind — that a recruiter spends six seconds on your resume — comes from a small eye-tracking study published by TheLadders in the United States in 2012. Their 2018 follow-up put it at 7.4 seconds, and that figure describes the initial screen stage of a two-stage study. The second stage used eye-tracking to follow what recruiters attended to while reading, under lab conditions.

So six or seven seconds is how long you have to survive a first cut. It is not how long anyone spends deciding whether to interview you, and it is certainly not how long a search consultant spends on an executive shortlist.

The useful part of that research was never the stopwatch. It was the eye-track: recruiters scanned the left of the page and locked onto job titles, and read most accurately from resumes with clear job titles supported by bulleted outcomes. So put the title, the organisation, the dates and the scale hard against the left margin, high on the page, in that order.

Length

Two to three pages for most professional and management roles — the non-executive band.

Above that, the honest answer is that it depends on the career, and anyone who gives you a single number is guessing. Australian executive CVs commonly run three to seven pages. What decides yours is how many of your roles carried real scale, and how much a reader has to see before the case for you is obvious — not a page count somebody read somewhere.

One page is a United States graduate convention, and a chief operating officer compressed onto it has deleted the evidence. That is the mistake worth avoiding. Length itself is not.

Public sector applications are a different document

Commonwealth, state and local government roles almost always ask for something in addition to the resume: a written statement, a pitch, or responses against published capabilities or selection criteria. The advertisement or the role description states the limit — a page count or a word count. Read that limit before you write a word, because it decides everything else.

Referees are the other reversal. 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 — the choice that exists elsewhere does not exist here.

In these applications the resume is supporting evidence and the statement is what gets scored. Build the statement from worked examples, structured as situation, task, action and result, and make sure they are genuinely yours. A panel reading eighty applications can tell a lived example from a reworded position description, and they read the reworded ones first thing on a Monday with no patience at all.

Mirror the advertisement, don’t stuff it

Use the employer’s own vocabulary. If the ad says category management, write category management, not “procurement optimisation”. Megan Lilly, Deputy Commissioner at Jobs and Skills Australia, describes the mechanism plainly — “machines often decide the applicants that will be reviewed by the recruiter” — and her point is that a job title conceals more skill than it reveals. Jobs and Skills Australia has proposed a National Skills Taxonomy — a common vocabulary for describing skills — and Lilly wrote in March 2026 that trials were about to start, with the main rollout beginning from the middle of the year.

Note the wording, though: reviewed by, not rejected by. Tracking systems sort and filter against criteria a person sets. They do not automatically bin most applications, and in Australia most employers are not yet using them that way at all — the QUT and AHRI study The State of AI in Australian Human Resources (December 2024, 236 HR professionals) found 3.4 per cent using AI to screen or shortlist, with a further 20.9 per cent using it partially.

Which means keyword stuffing buys you nothing and costs you the human read. Use each term once, in a sentence that is true.

The market you are writing into

SEEK’s Employment Report covering July 2026, published 12 August 2026, recorded applications per job ad at the highest level on record, while advertised roles fell 6.0 per cent over the year. The ABS put the unemployment rate at 4.4 per cent in June 2026, with underemployment at 6.5 per cent and participation at 67.0 per cent (released 23 July 2026).

There is work. There is also a queue at every advertised role, and the queue is longer than it has ever been on SEEK’s records.

What we would do

Write the whole career once, with the numbers in it — revenue, headcount, budget, sites, jurisdictions, and what moved while you were there. Then rewrite the top third of page one for every application you are serious about, and leave the rest alone.

Read it out loud before you send it. Anything you would be embarrassed to say to the person’s face, cut. Anything you could not defend in a reference call, cut.

Then have someone else read it, because you cannot see your own career from the outside. That is most of what we do: we ask executives for the arithmetic they have stopped noticing, and we don’t start writing until they produce it.

If you would rather have that done for you, by someone who has read a few thousand of these, that is our Executive Resume:

$775.00 Original price was: $775.00.$695.00Current price is: $695.00. inc. GSTAdd to cart

Sources: Australian HR Institute, Quarterly Australian Work Outlook, March Quarter 2026 (fieldwork 2–13 January 2026, n=612) — 19% of employers excluding older workers aged 55 and above; 69% excluding on some characteristic. Australian HR Institute and Australian Human Rights Commission, Employing and Retaining Older Workers Survey, May 2023. Age Discrimination Act 2004 (Cth); Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth); Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth); Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth). Australian Public Service Commission, Applying for an APS job (Cracking the Code), apsc.gov.au (read 18 August 2026) — referees on the CV. TheLadders, eye-tracking studies, 2012 and 2018 (7.4-second average initial screen; left-margin and job-title scanning). P. Williams, T.-F. Kummer, M. Maskor and C. Kennon, The State of AI in Australian Human Resources, QUT and the Australian HR Institute, December 2024, n=236. Megan Lilly, Deputy Commissioner, Jobs and Skills Australia, “As AI recruitment becomes the norm, Australia risks leaving real talent behind”, opinion piece, 17 March 2026, jobsandskills.gov.au (read 18 August 2026). SEEK, Employment Report (July 2026 data), published 12 August 2026. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force, Australia, June 2026, released 23 July 2026.
Most recent source consulted: 18 August 2026 (SEEK Employment Report re-read at source; ABS latest release re-checked; APSC referee wording confirmed verbatim).