Australia inverts the rule most applicants have internalised: here a resume is expected to be long. Three or four pages is normal, referees are listed by name with contact details, and government and large-employer roles are scored against written selection criteria before anyone looks at your career history. Add work rights to the top of the page and you have covered the three things an Australian screener checks first.
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The six questions people ask most, answered in a line each.
What it's called in Australia: Resume / CV
2–4 pages — length is expected
Two pages for early career, three to four once established, and longer again for government roles. A one-page Australian resume reads as underqualified.
No
Australian anti-discrimination law makes photos a liability for employers, and there is no local convention of including one.
Australian English
Follows British spelling — organise, specialise, centre — with local vocabulary like "casual", "full-time equivalent" and "enterprise agreement".
Mon YYYY; DD/MM/YYYY elsewhere
Day-first ordering, same as the UK. Note that the Australian financial year runs July to June, which matters when you describe annual results.
PDF or DOCX, A4
A4 paper. Recruitment agencies frequently ask for Word so they can reformat and add branding before sending you to the client.
Two referees, listed in full
Name, role, organisation, phone and email at the end of the resume — the Australian convention, and unlike the UK or US, expected up front.
Resumito's country engine turns each of these on or off automatically when you pick Australia as your target.
Profile photo
We keep this field out of your Australia resume.
Date of birth
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Nationality
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Marital status
We keep this field out of your Australia resume.
Military service status
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Place of birth
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References
Listed in full on the resumeHobbies & interests
Not shownTop to bottom, the order a Australia employer expects to read.
Contact details and work rights
Name, phone, email, suburb and state, LinkedIn — plus one line naming your visa or residency status.
Career profile
Four or five lines. Longer than a UK personal statement, and expected to name your discipline and your level.
Key skills / capabilities
A scannable block near the top, mirroring the language of the job ad and the selection criteria if there are any.
Employment history
Reverse-chronological and detailed. Australians expect responsibilities and achievements, not a compressed one-line-per-job summary.
Education and licences
Degrees plus any Australian licence, ticket or registration — White Card, driver's licence, AHPRA registration, Working with Children Check.
Professional memberships and training
Engineers Australia, CPA Australia, ACS and similar bodies carry weight, especially if a skills assessment is part of your visa path.
Referees
Two, with full contact details, at the end. Ask them first — Australian employers call referees before an offer as a matter of routine.
Australian hiring reads a resume as a record rather than as an advertisement. Recruiters and hiring managers want to see the scope of each role, the size of the teams and budgets, the systems used, and enough detail to judge whether the experience transfers. Compressing all that into a single American-style page removes precisely the evidence they are looking for, and the resume reads as a junior candidate's.
Length is not licence to ramble. Each role gets a two-line context sentence — what the organisation does, how big it is, where you sat — then responsibilities, then achievements with numbers. Roles older than about ten years can compress to a line each. What you are aiming for is three or four pages that a reader can skim in ninety seconds and then read properly if interested.
Public sector roles at federal, state and local level, plus many universities and large not-for-profits, publish a list of selection criteria with the advertisement — statements like "demonstrated ability to manage competing priorities in a high-volume environment". Your application is scored against each one, sometimes by a panel using a rubric, and a strong resume attached to unanswered criteria does not progress.
Answer each criterion in its own short section using STAR: the situation, the task you owned, the action you took, and the measurable result. Keep each to roughly 150–250 words unless the ad specifies otherwise, and use the criterion's own wording as the heading so the panel can find your answer instantly. This is a separate document from the resume, and skipping it is the most common reason a well-qualified overseas applicant is filtered out of Australian public sector hiring.
Australia is unusually direct about this, and stating your visa status on a resume is normal rather than awkward. Write what you hold: "Australian citizen", "Permanent resident", "Subclass 482 visa, full work rights to 03/2028", "Subclass 500 student visa, 48 hours per fortnight". Recruiters filter on it early because sponsorship changes the cost and timeline of the hire.
If you are still offshore, a skills assessment is often the gate rather than the job itself. Engineers Australia, ACS for IT, VETASSESS for a wide range of professional occupations and CPA Australia for accounting each assess foreign qualifications against Australian standards, and the outcome feeds both your visa points and an employer's confidence. If yours is done, put it on the resume — "ACS skills assessment: suitable, ANZSCO 261313 Software Engineer" is a line that answers several questions at once.
Where the UK holds referees back and the US omits them entirely, Australian resumes typically end with two named referees including phone and email — usually your most recent manager and one other person who supervised your work. Employers call them, often before the final interview, and a resume that says only "available on request" can read as evasive in this market.
For applicants from Iran this needs preparation. Give referees who can hold a conversation in English, warn them that an Australian number may call at an awkward hour, and note the time zone next to their details as a courtesy. If a former manager has left the company, use their current contact and say where they were when they supervised you — a referee who cannot be reached is worse than one fewer referee.
The errors that sink the largest number of otherwise strong resumes.
Sending a one-page US-style resume
The single most common error from applicants trained on American advice. In Australia it removes the detail the reader wants and signals less experience than you have.
Ignoring the selection criteria
For government and university roles an unanswered criteria document is an incomplete application, no matter how strong the resume attached to it.
Leaving out work rights
Australian recruiters ask this in the first thirty seconds of a call. Answering it on the page saves you from being filtered out as an unknown.
American spelling and units
Australia uses British spelling and the metric system. "Organized" and imperial measurements both mark the document as imported.
Listing referees who were never asked
Since Australian employers actually call, an unprepared referee in another time zone answering a cold call is a real risk to an otherwise strong application.
Australia's skilled migration system is points-based and occupation-based, which means the sequence matters: for most people the skills assessment comes before the job hunt, not after it. Find your occupation on the skilled occupation list, identify the assessing authority — ACS, Engineers Australia, VETASSESS, CPA Australia — and start that process early, because assessments of Iranian qualifications take months and need documents from your university.
On the resume itself, translate the Iranian conventions out — photo, date of birth, marital status and military service all come off — but keep the referee block, because unlike the UK and US, Australia expects it. Add a scale clause to each Iranian employer so the reader can size your experience, and use ANZSCO occupation titles for your roles where they fit, since that vocabulary runs through both the visa system and the job ads.
One local detail worth knowing: Australia has a large regional-employment incentive structure, and roles outside Sydney and Melbourne are often easier to enter and carry extra visa points. If you are genuinely open to relocating regionally, saying so in one line — "open to regional relocation" — meaningfully widens the set of employers who will consider an offshore applicant.
Two to four pages, and length is expected rather than penalised. Two pages suit early career, three or four suit an established professional, and government applications with selection criteria run longer still. A one-page resume reads as underqualified here.
They are the scored requirements published with public sector, university and many not-for-profit roles. Yes — answer each one in its own short STAR-structured section, roughly 150 to 250 words, using the criterion's own wording as the heading. An application without them is treated as incomplete.
Yes — two, with name, role, organisation, phone and email at the end of the document. This is the local convention and differs from the UK and US. Ask permission first, because Australian employers routinely call referees before making an offer.
Yes, in one line near your contact details — citizenship, permanent residency, or your visa subclass with its work rights and expiry. Australian recruiters screen on work rights very early, and leaving it blank usually means being filtered out rather than asked.
For the skilled visa pathways, yes — the assessment by ACS, Engineers Australia, VETASSESS or the relevant body is a prerequisite rather than a formality. Employers also read a completed assessment as independent confirmation that your Iranian qualification meets Australian standards, so it is worth naming on the resume.
No. Anti-discrimination legislation makes photos a liability for employers and there is no local convention of including one. The same applies to date of birth, marital status and nationality.
Large employers, government departments and recruitment agencies generally do. Keep the layout single-column with standard headings, and mirror the vocabulary of the ad and the selection criteria — those exact phrases are frequently what the system and the panel both search for.
It's not the same template. Resumito's country engine (8 data points per country) toggles which personal fields and sections appear based on your target country — Australia gets its own rules, shown above.
Yes — you can build and download your first Australia-formatted resume on the free plan, no credit card required.
Yes, you can change your target country any time from the resume editor and Resumito re-applies the field rules instantly.
Pick Australia as your target country and Resumito turns each of these fields on or off for you — nothing to memorise.
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