Quick answer
An Australian resume runs 2-3 pages (not the US one page), lists referees by name and contact detail rather than "available on request", drops photo/DOB/marital status, and frames salary as base plus the Superannuation Guarantee (12% from 1 July 2026, per the ATO). Screening runs through Seek into an employer's ATS — commonly PageUp, Workday, or Oracle Taleo — plus JobAdder on the agency side. New Zealand shares the region but keeps its own convention: it's a CV, kept to two pages, otherwise following the same British-spelling and no-photo rules.
Length: two to three pages, not one
A US resume gets squeezed onto one page for most candidates, two only once a career runs long. An Australian resume runs comfortably to two, often three, pages, and a candidate who force-fits ten years of experience onto a single US-style page can read as thin rather than concise. New Zealand splits the difference at two pages — more in the section below. The extra length isn't padding; it's where an Australian resume fits fuller role descriptions, a proper Referees section, and the kind of detail Australian recruiters expect to see before they pick up the phone.
Referees, not references
US resumes end with "References available upon request", or say nothing about references at all. An Australian resume conventionally does the opposite: a dedicated "Referees" section, usually two, with name, job title, organisation, and contact details supplied directly rather than held back for a later request. Leaving it as a US-style throwaway line, or titling the section "References" instead of "Referees", is one of the fastest tells that a resume wasn't written for the Australian market. Check with your referees before listing them, the same courtesy that applies everywhere.
What comes off: photo, date of birth, and marital status
Like the UK and the US, Australian convention leaves off a photo, date of birth, and marital status, and there's real law behind the norm: the Age Discrimination Act 2004 (Cth) makes age a protected attribute in employment, and stripping out age-revealing details — exact graduation years included — removes a data point an employer would rather not have when they're not supposed to be weighing it. None of it helps ATS parsing either. The systems read text, not photographs, so a headshot does nothing but add a file-size problem to the document.
Salary in two parts: base plus superannuation
Australian pay isn't just a number — it's base salary plus superannuation, the compulsory retirement contribution employers pay on top of wages. The Australian Taxation Office confirms the Superannuation Guarantee rate reached 12% from 1 July 2026, calculated on an employee's qualifying earnings each payday under the new Payday Super rules. A resume or cover letter that quotes a single US-style number without acknowledging the base-plus-super structure reads as imported, and it can genuinely misstate your actual package if a recruiter assumes a figure is inclusive of super when it isn't, or vice versa. State plainly whether a salary figure is base-only or a total package.
Spelling and the keyword mismatch
Australian English follows British spelling conventions — organise, specialise, colour, not their US equivalents — and the same exact-match problem that shows up in UK-versus-US resumes shows up here. A recruiter's ATS search for "organisation" won't reliably surface a resume that only contains "organization". It's a small detail with an outsized effect on whether a genuinely qualified resume ever appears in a keyword search result at all — the same invisible-not-rejected dynamic we cover in how ATS screening actually works.
Where the screening actually happens: Seek, PageUp, and Workday
Most Australian job hunts start on Seek, but Seek itself is a job board, not the system doing the screening — applications flow through into an employer's own applicant tracking system from there. PageUp, an ATS that started in Australia in 1997 and is headquartered in Melbourne, names healthcare, higher education, and government among its core markets on its own site, which lines up with how widely it's used across universities, hospitals, and public-sector recruitment. Large private-sector employers commonly run the same global platforms used everywhere else — Workday and Oracle Taleo among them — and agency recruiters frequently work from JobAdder rather than an employer-side ATS.
Whichever platform sits behind a given application, the mechanics are the same ones covered across this site: parse the resume into structured fields, index it, and let a recruiter search it by keyword. Clean single-column formatting and Australian-market keyword accuracy matter here exactly as much as they do in the US or the UK.
New Zealand: its own CV, not a rebadged Australian resume
New Zealand shares a region with Australia in our pricing and a lot of convention, but it isn't simply Australia with different flags. New Zealand's own government careers guidance tells applicants to keep a CV to two pages where possible, never to include a photo ("don't use images"), and to keep formatting "simple and consistent" specifically because that's what parses reliably in applicant tracking systems. Referees are expected content, the same as in Australia, and the document is called a CV, not a resume — vocabulary that matters here as much as it does in the UK.
The practical upshot: an NZ-bound application runs two pages rather than the Australian two-to-three, keeps the CV label, and otherwise follows the same British-spelling, no-photo, referees-included conventions that apply across Australia. We write to NZ specifics, not a reused Australian file, for exactly this reason.
Same pipeline, different market
Strip away the formatting conventions and an Australian resume is screened by the identical parse-index-search pipeline covered in how ATS screening actually works. What changes is the vocabulary the search runs on, and the conventions that tell a human reader you didn't just export a US template. It's why we build pricing and delivery around eight regions — the US, Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia, New Zealand, India, and the Gulf — rather than treating resume writing as one universal document. Our Australia & New Zealand resume service is written to these conventions from the first draft, not adapted after the fact.
Where we come in — for Australia and New Zealand
We rewrite your resume and LinkedIn profile to Australian or New Zealand convention — Australian English, the referee section handled properly, base-plus-super salary framing — and verify it against recruiter keyword research for your exact job title. Delivered in 72 hours.