A decade of selection criteria expertise, written down.
Four practical guides covering selection criteria, resume writing, and the writing fundamentals most professionals were never taught. Written by Jacqueline Liversidge, founder of The Resume Writers, after ten years of working on selection criteria responses across federal, state and local government and the private sector. One is free. The other three are calibrated to specific audiences — individual job seekers, applicants writing complex government criteria responses, and HR teams writing the criteria itself.
The Non-Writers Guide to Writing
A short practical guide written for professionals who don't think of themselves as writers. Most people who hire a resume service do so because they know they're not great at writing about themselves — this guide covers the fundamentals that make work writing clearer: structure, audience, brevity, and how to start when you don't know what to say.
- Starting a piece of writing when you don't know what to say
- Structuring emails, reports and proposals so they read clearly
- Writing for a specific audience rather than for yourself
- Common grammar and sentence-structure mistakes professionals make
- Practical exercises to build a writing habit that holds
Calibrated to who you are.
Three guides for three different audiences. Pick the one that matches your situation — they don't overlap and you don't need all three.
The Ultimate Guide to Resume Writing
A practical handbook for writing your own resume — covering the structural decisions that distinguish a strong resume from a competent one. Written for professionals who want to write their own resume but want to do it properly.
- Structuring content hierarchy and white space for readability
- Writing achievement-led role descriptions with quantified outcomes
- Calibrating tone and language register to industry conventions
- Writing a useful summary statement (and when to skip it)
- Industry-specific patterns: engineering, teaching, leadership, government
- How ATS works in the Australian market, and why it matters less than people think
- Aligning your resume with your LinkedIn profile
- Handling employment gaps, career changes and re-entry
Mastering Selection Criteria
A working guide to writing selection criteria responses — the application requirement that decides hiring for almost every government role and many private sector roles. Written for individuals who need to write the response themselves and want a defensible methodology rather than guesswork.
- What selection criteria actually are, and why they exist
- The STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result) applied honestly
- Choosing examples that map to the criterion you're being scored on
- Calibrating responses for federal APS, state and local government
- Writing under tight deadlines without losing structural quality
- Addressing gaps in experience without weakening the response
- Editing for clarity, professionalism and word-count discipline
- Worked examples across different role types and seniority levels
The Australian Guide to Selection Criteria
A reference document for HR teams, hiring managers and recruiters who write selection criteria themselves — covering legal compliance, anti-discrimination obligations, ethical hiring practice, and the structural rules that distinguish defensible criteria from problematic ones. The longest of the four guides because the audience is professional and the obligations are non-trivial.
- Australian anti-discrimination law as it applies to hiring
- Fair Work Act 2009 and Privacy Act 1988 compliance in selection
- Writing criteria that test what the role actually requires
- Templates and checklists for selection panels
- Data protection protocols for candidate information
- Diversity and inclusion calibration in criteria design
- Case studies — both successful and flawed implementations
- Continuous improvement and audit framework for selection processes
Or just talk to us.
The books are useful if you want to write your own resume or selection criteria response. If you'd rather have someone who's done it thousands of times do it for you, that's our day job. A 15-minute consultation is free and there's no obligation.