Resume · Job seeking · Guide
How to Write a Resume That Gets Interviews
The average Australian job ad now receives 184 applications. The recruiter spends 6–30 seconds on each before deciding whether to keep reading. Here's how to write the version that survives that scan — and what changed in the last 18 months that broke most resume advice you've read.
In thirty seconds
- Lead with outcomes, not duties. "Managed a team" loses; "Led a team of 8 to deliver $2M project on time and 8% under budget" wins.
- Tailor every resume to the role. Mirror the job ad's exact phrasing where it accurately describes your experience.
- Use a clean, single-column, ATS-friendly layout. Avoid Canva, sidebars, tables, photos, and decorative fonts — they break the parser.
- Open with a 3–4 line professional summary that states your value, not your aspirations. "Seeking a new challenge" is dead.
- Two pages is the standard for experienced candidates in Australia. One page only if you're early career. Three pages only for senior executives or selection-criteria heavy government roles.
The job market candidates are competing in right now is harder than at almost any point in modern Australian hiring. Applications per ad have hit record highs for three years running. Recruiters skim the average resume in 6 to 30 seconds before deciding whether it's worth reading properly. Most of the resumes they see now are AI-polished and indistinguishable from each other.
That means the bar to clear isn't "writing a good resume." It's writing a resume that survives a 30-second scan and looks unmistakably like the work of a real person describing real work. The principles below are what does that, in the actual current market.
The market you're writing into
184
Average applications per Australian job ad in early 2025 — up from 41 in late 2024
6–30 sec
Recruiter scan time on the average resume before deciding whether to keep reading
99%
of Fortune 500 companies use ATS to filter applications before humans see them
Now the playbook. Eight steps, in roughly the order they should shape the document.
The eight things that actually matter
Shift from duties to outcomes
The single biggest difference between a resume that gets shortlisted and one that doesn't. Duty lists describe what you were responsible for; outcomes describe what changed because you did the work. Recruiters scan for outcomes; duty lists turn into wallpaper.
"Managed customer service team."
"Led a customer service team of 12, reducing average call wait times from 4.2 minutes to 2.6 over six months and lifting CSAT scores from 72% to 91%."
Frame every bullet around the outcome. Use strong action verbs (Led, Designed, Delivered, Built, Restructured), include specifics where you have them (team size, project value, time frame, baseline-and-result), and answer the unspoken question every recruiter asks: so what?
Caveat: real metrics only. AI-generated round percentages on every bullet is now a tell. We've covered this in detail in the metric mirage.
Tailor every resume to the role
Generic resumes don't survive in a 184-applications-per-ad market. The mechanism is simple: most large Australian employers use Applicant Tracking Systems that score how closely your resume matches the job ad's language. If you've used "client liaison" and the ad says "stakeholder engagement," the system reads them as different things — even though to a human, they're nearly identical.
- Mirror the exact phrasing from the job ad where it accurately describes your experience
- Lift the role-specific terminology (PRINCE2 vs Agile, IFRS vs GAAP, ITIL vs COBIT) into your skills section
- Reorder your bullets so the most relevant work to this role lands in the top third of the first page
- Don't keyword-stuff — the ATS layer is sophisticated enough to spot it, and the human reviewer definitely will
Practical workflow: keep a "master resume" that has every achievement, every project, every metric you can point to. For each application, copy the master, cut what isn't relevant, and tune the language to the ad. The master document grows with you over time and saves hours per application.
Use a clean, ATS-friendly format
The most common mistake we see is candidates designing beautiful Canva resumes that fail at the parser stage. The same design choices that look great on a portfolio website — sidebars, columns, icons, profile photos, colour blocks — actively confuse Applicant Tracking Systems. Your contact details disappear, your skills don't get parsed, and the whole document scores low before a human ever sees it.
- Single-column layout. No sidebars, no two-column splits.
- Standard fonts: Calibri, Arial, Aptos, or Helvetica. 10–11pt body, 14–16pt headers.
- Black text on white. No colour blocks, no shaded backgrounds.
- Standard section headings: Experience, Education, Skills. (Not "My Journey" or "What I Bring.")
- No tables, no text boxes, no headers/footers carrying important content.
- No photos, no logos, no icons, no skills-as-progress-bars.
- Save as .docx by default. PDF only when the application instructions specify it.
For the deeper version of this section — including a worked keyword extraction example and a free ATS-checker tool — see ATS vs human readers.
Open strong with a professional summary
The first 3–4 lines of your resume are the most valuable real estate on the document. They're what determines whether the recruiter keeps reading or moves on. They have one job: state who you are professionally and what you do well, in a way that fits the role you're applying to.
"Motivated team player seeking a new challenge in a dynamic and fast-paced environment to leverage my passion for excellence."
"Commercially-focused operations manager with 12 years across Australian FMCG and retail. Strong record of supply-chain optimisation in roles spanning $40–80M annual budgets. Currently leading a national distribution restructure for a Top 50 retailer."
The good version gives a recruiter four things in 30 words: discipline (operations), seniority (12 years, leads major projects), sector (FMCG / retail / Australian), and current credibility (Top 50 retailer, $40–80M budgets). The bad version says nothing.
Include a skills snapshot
A short, well-pitched skills section directly under your professional summary makes the ATS's job easier and gives the recruiter a fast read on your technical fit. Format as a 2–3 column list of hard skills — software, methodologies, certifications, tools, frameworks — not soft skills.
Hard skills go here: Salesforce, Power BI, PRINCE2, Agile, Lean Six Sigma, AWS, Xero, MYOB, SAP, IFRS, ITIL, Tableau, contract negotiation, Federal Court advocacy, paediatric nursing.
Soft skills go in the experience section, demonstrated through achievements: "communication" doesn't belong as a skills bullet; "Briefed Deputy Secretary fortnightly on portfolio policy developments" does.
Structure each role consistently
Every role in your employment history should follow the same structure, in the same order. Inconsistency reads as carelessness — and the parser hates it.
- Job title (bold)
- Employer name + location
- Dates: Month/Year – Month/Year (be consistent — "Mar 2019 – Dec 2023" everywhere, not "March 2019" in some places and "03/2019" in others)
- One-line role summary (scope, scale, reporting line)
- 3–6 achievement bullets, in order of relevance to the role you're applying to
Project Manager
ABC Construction · Sydney NSW · Mar 2019 – Dec 2023
Led delivery of multi-million-dollar residential builds from tender to handover across NSW and VIC, reporting to General Manager.
- Delivered 27 residential projects on time and within budget; portfolio value $43M across 5 years.
- Introduced critical-path scheduling improvements that cut average build time by 12 weeks per project.
- Achieved 96% client satisfaction across 320 post-completion surveys; led to repeat-customer revenue of $11.4M.
- Mentored four junior project managers, two of whom progressed to senior PM roles within the company.
Show progression, group multiple roles at one employer
One of the strongest signals on a resume is upward movement — promotions, expanding responsibilities, increasing scope. Make this visible. If you held multiple roles at the same organisation, group them under one company heading rather than treating them as separate employers.
This shows continuity and growth in a single visual block, rather than fragmenting your tenure. It also makes your resume shorter, which is almost always a good thing.
Department of Finance · Canberra ACT · 2018 – Present
Senior Policy Officer (EL2) · 2022 – Present
Policy Officer (EL1) · 2020 – 2022
Graduate · 2018 – 2020
Trim ruthlessly, then proofread relentlessly
Every word should earn its place. Cut:
- Jobs more than 15 years old (unless directly relevant)
- Generic descriptors ("hardworking," "results-driven," "team player")
- Repetition — if "stakeholder management" appears in 11 bullets, the 11th doesn't add anything
- Buzzwords ("synergised," "leveraged," "spearheaded," "passionate about driving") — these are AI tells now, and they were always weak
- Hobbies and personal information unless directly relevant to the role
Then proofread. A single typo can damage credibility, particularly for senior roles. Read your resume aloud — typos that escape silent reading often catch you when you say them. Read it backwards, sentence by sentence, to catch tense errors. Have someone else read it. Use past tense for previous roles, present tense for your current role, and never mix them within a single bullet.
Length guidance — Australian convention
Two pages is standard for experienced professionals. One page only if you're a graduate or early career (under 5 years). Three pages is acceptable for senior executives or roles requiring detailed selection criteria responses. American "always one page" advice doesn't apply in Australia — recruiters here expect more substance.
The recruiter spending 30 seconds on your resume isn't reading it. They're scanning for signals. Your job is to make the scan succeed — and only then, to make the close-read worth their time.
What to skip entirely
The things to leave off the resume have shifted in the last few years. Don't include:
- Your photo — illegal to use in some contexts, awkward in most, bias risk in all
- Your full date of birth or age — irrelevant; protected characteristic in Australia
- Marital status, religion, nationality — same reason
- Hobbies and interests — unless they're directly relevant (a winemaker applying to a wine industry role; a competitive athlete applying to a sports brand)
- References — "References available on request" is dead space; recruiters know they can ask
- Your high school — unless you're a recent graduate with no tertiary qualifications
- Generic objective statements — replaced by the professional summary in Step 4
Read more
This guide is the overview. We've written longer pieces on the deeper mechanics of each part of the modern resume:
The bigger picture
None of these principles are new in 2026. What's changed is that AI tools have made the basics easy enough that everyone executes them — which means the basics no longer differentiate. Polished is cheap now. The advantage has moved to specificity, evidence, and voice. Real numbers. Real situations. Real language a recruiter would actually use.
The candidates getting interviewed aren't out-polishing the AI-assisted competition. They're stepping out of that competition entirely — submitting documents that are unmistakably the work of a real person who cared about the application. That's harder to do than asking ChatGPT to rewrite your resume. It's also the reason it works.
Or just have us write it
Everything in this guide, applied by a senior writer to your career
An hour-long interview where we surface the achievements, scope, and metrics you actually have — calibrated to your level and sector. We write it by hand, in language that sounds like you, structured to clear ATS parsing and read well to the human reviewer who eventually sees it. The whole guide above, applied by someone who does this for a living. No AI. No offshore. No templates. 4.8 on Google. Trading since 2016.
