How to convert your resume to Australian format (US, UK, Indian)

If you need to convert your resume to Australian format, the changes are mechanical and checkable. The document is called a resume, it runs to about two pages, it uses Australian spelling, it carries an Australian mobile number and suburb in the header, and it drops the personal details that resumes from India, the United States and many other countries still carry. The point is not to look like an overseas document to a recruiter who scans a high volume of resumes, or to the parsing software that reads yours first.

This guide follows the order a recruiter reads the page, then covers what changes for a US resume, a UK CV and an Indian resume. The examples are anonymised composites from the people we have worked with.

Is it a CV or a resume in Australia?

Australians call it a resume, and that is the word to use in your file name, your heading and your cover letter. SEEK writes "resumé" with an accent; most employers write it plainly as resume, and either is fine. In Australia, CV tends to mean a long academic document with publications, so a general applicant who sends a "CV" signals that they learned the term somewhere else.

For a UK job seeker this is a rename, not a rewrite. For a US job seeker the word matches but the length does not. The practical rule: name the file Firstname-Lastname-Resume.pdf, head the document with your name rather than the words "Curriculum Vitae", and write "my resume" in the cover letter and in SEEK's application fields.

Which spellings change on an Australian resume?

Australian spelling follows British conventions, and US spelling is one of the clearest signals that a resume was written somewhere else. Our ruleset treats it as a primary auto-filter signal for internationally trained applicants: a recruiter sees "optimized" and "specialized" in the first bullet and reads the whole page as not yet local. The table lists the words that turn up most often on resumes.

Set your word processor's proofing language to English (Australia) before you start and the red underlines do most of the work. Product names and certification titles keep the spelling their owners use. The job ad is the tie-breaker for anything the table does not cover.

How are dates and phone numbers written on an Australian resume?

Write date ranges as Month YYYY to Month YYYY, and write your phone number in the Australian mobile format, 04XX XXX XXX. Australia reads dates as day, month, year, so an American "03/09/2022" is read here as 3 September, not 9 March. Month names remove the ambiguity.

For work and education entries use the short month and the four-digit year: "Sep 2023 to Jan 2025", or "Sep 2023 to present" for a current role. Where a formal date is needed, in a cover letter for example, write DD/MM/YYYY or spell it out: 1 November 2026.

If you are in Australia with an Australian SIM, 04XX XXX XXX is the only phone format you need. If you are still overseas, use the international form, +61 4XX XXX XXX, which drops the leading zero. An Indian +91 or a US +1 number at the top of the page is the quickest signal that a candidate may not be in the country, and a recruiter who needs someone to start in two weeks often does not call to find out. If you have landed and still carry your home number, a local SIM is the cheapest fix on the page.

Which personal details should I remove from an Australian resume?

Remove the photo, date of birth, age, marital status, gender, religion, nationality, passport number, parents' names and your full street address. Australian resumes do not carry any of these, and including them flags a non-local document while adding discrimination risk for the employer, which is a reason for a cautious recruiter to pass.

Keep the header to what a recruiter uses: your name, an Australian mobile number, a professional email, your suburb and state (for example "Parramatta, NSW"), and your LinkedIn URL. The one status line that belongs in the header is your work-rights line, stated as the status you already hold, directly under your contact details. The exact sentence for each status is in our guide on how to write your work rights on an Australian resume. That is phrasing only; neither guide covers visa questions.

Two more items read as overseas: the signed declaration at the bottom that is standard in India, and the US-style "Objective" paragraph, which Australia has replaced with a three-line professional summary stating what you offer.

How long should an Australian resume be, and can it have a photo?

About two pages is the Australian norm, and no, it should not have a photo. One page is fine for a current student or a recent graduate with thin experience. An experienced professional whose overseas career runs deep can take up to three pages. US-trained applicants make the reverse mistake to Indian-trained ones: they compress ten years into one page and lose the evidence of scale.

The length rule follows the two branches of conversion. A Monash master's graduate on a 485 is padding thin experience, so university projects, casual work and volunteering earn space and one or two pages is right. A Hyderabad test lead moving to Melbourne is right-sizing deep experience, so the job is cutting the first two roles to one line each, converting titles to local equivalents and keeping the last two roles in full. Our guide on putting overseas experience on an Australian resume covers the title translation.

Leave the photo off, every time. It marks the document as European or South Asian in origin and exposes the employer to a bias complaint. The headshot belongs on LinkedIn.

Should I list referees on an Australian resume?

Yes. List two referees, ideally Australian, with name, title, organisation, phone and email, and back them with current LinkedIn recommendations. Australian recruiters expect referees on or with the resume and usually call them between the final interview and the offer. A line that reads "References available on request" is read as "I have not organised any yet".

Two is the number. More looks padded and one looks thin. A manager, team lead, university supervisor or volunteer coordinator in Australia is ideal, because a recruiter can call in business hours. If both referees are still overseas, list them with the international format and the time zone in brackets, and build Australian ones through casual work, internships and volunteering. Ask each referee first and send them your resume so the stories match. A LinkedIn recommendation from a former manager does double duty: the recruiter sees it before calling anyone, and it keeps your dates and titles consistent in public.

What is the phone-screen check for an Australian resume?

Save the resume as a PDF, send it to yourself and open it on your own phone. If the columns stack out of order, the header wraps over four lines, or you have to pinch to read a bullet, rebuild the document as a single column. The check catches the two problems a parser and a recruiter share: layouts that read in the wrong order, and text boxes that do not read at all.

The applicant tracking systems that SEEK, PageUp and Workday employers use extract text from your PDF in the same reading order. A two-column template puts your skills sidebar into the middle of your work history in the parsed record. Single column, standard headings (Professional Summary, Work Experience, Skills, Education), one font, no tables for layout, no skill-dot ratings, no icons for phone and email. Our note on whether SEEK uses an ATS explains the pipeline, and the free check at /check shows the findings on your own file rather than a score.

Check the first lines too: name, Australian mobile, email, suburb and state, LinkedIn, work-rights line. Anything else above your professional summary moves down.

What changes from a US resume to an Australian resume?

A US resume converts to an Australian one by lengthening it to two pages, switching the spelling, reformatting the dates and the phone number, and replacing the Objective with a professional summary. The content model is otherwise close.

The changes, in the order we make them on an anonymised composite of US-trained applicants:

• Let the document breathe to two pages. The one-page rule is not an Australian rule.
• Change the paper size from US Letter to A4.
• Run the spelling table. "Optimized", "analyzed", "organized" and "center" appear in almost every US document.
• Convert MM/DD/YYYY dates to Month YYYY ranges.
• Replace the +1 number with an Australian mobile, and add suburb and state.
• Replace "Objective" with a three-line professional summary: title, years, domain and the one strength that is scarce in your field.
• Remove the GPA unless a graduate program explicitly asks for it, and write the degree in full the first time rather than B.S.
• Add two referees. US resumes omit them by habit; Australian recruiters expect them.
• State your work rights in the header, in the phrasing for the status you hold.

Your achievement bullets with numbers and your habit of tailoring keywords to each ad transfer directly. If the converted resume still gets no replies, the problem is usually positioning rather than format, and our guide on why a resume is not getting interviews in Australia is the next read.

What changes from a UK CV to an Australian resume?

A UK CV needs the least conversion of the three: rename it a resume, swap the UK phone number and postcode for an Australian mobile and suburb, drop the nationality line, and check a handful of spellings. The length, the date format and most of the spelling already match Australian practice.

The changes that remain, from an anonymised composite of UK-trained applicants:

• Change "Curriculum Vitae" at the top to your name, and call the document a resume in the file name and cover letter.
• Replace the +44 mobile with an Australian 04XX number and the postcode with suburb and state.
• Remove "Nationality: British" and the date of birth if either is still there.
• Replace the GCSE and A-level lines with the degree alone. School results read as filler on a tertiary-qualified resume.
• Check "programme". UK English uses it everywhere; Australian usage favours "program". Mirror the job ad.
• Replace a first-person personal statement ("I am a highly motivated...") with a summary such as "Chartered accountant with eight years in audit across retail and logistics."
• Replace "References available on request", the UK default, with two named referees.
• Translate titles that do not map. "Band 6 nurse" means nothing to an Australian hospital recruiter until the clinical role and specialty sit beside it.

What changes from an Indian resume to an Australian resume?

An Indian resume to an Australian resume is the largest conversion of the three, and it is mostly removal: the photo, the personal details block, the declaration, the school results and the extra pages. What remains then needs Australian spelling, Australian number formats, local job titles and two referees.

From an anonymised composite of Indian-trained applicants, including the Hyderabad test lead above, the changes in order:

• Remove the photo, date of birth, gender, marital status, nationality, religion, passport number, father's or husband's name, and the full postal address. Keep suburb and state.
• Remove the declaration and signature block at the end.
• Remove Class 10 and Class 12 results and the school names. Lead with your highest qualification and its graduation year.
• Replace the career objective with a three-line professional summary.
• Convert lakh and crore to Australian dollars and mark the figure as approximate: "managed a ₹50 lakh budget" becomes "managed a budget of approximately A$90 000", with a note that the figure is converted.
• Translate the titles. "Fresher" becomes "graduate". "Team Lead (Testing)" becomes "Test Lead" or "QA Lead", whichever the Australian ads for your target roles use. "Presently working" becomes "to present".
• Write the degree in full once, then abbreviate: "Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) in Electronics and Communication Engineering".
• Replace the +91 number with an Australian mobile.
• Cut to two pages, three at most for a senior profile, by reducing the earliest roles to one line each.
• Add two referees, Australian where you have them, and remove "References: available on request".

Indian English is British in origin, but US-written software documentation means "optimized" and "analyzed" creep in, so run the table anyway. If you are a current student or recent graduate rather than an experienced professional, the padding branch applies instead of the cutting one, and our guide on the Australian resume format for international students covers what earns a place on a thin resume.

How do I know the conversion worked?

The conversion worked when a recruiter cannot tell from the page which country you trained in until they reach your education section. Check the five header lines on a phone, run the spelling table, confirm the dates read Month YYYY, confirm the personal details block is gone, count the pages, and confirm two referees are named. Then paste the result into the free resume check, which reads your document the way a parser does and lists spelling, header and personal-detail findings rather than a score.

Converting a resume to Australian format is a one-hour job once you know the list: rename, strip, respell, reformat, resize, add referees, check on a phone. Everything after that is positioning, which is where the real work of getting read begins.