Look at the job advert or scope of the role. Think about what the job involves, and what the employer needs. Find out about the main activities of the employer and customise your CV to this.

Study the responsibilities and language in the advert. Align your CV with specifics of what the employer is looking for. Make sure you use similar language to the employer.

Try to look objectively at your experiences (even the bad ones) and identify what you learned or what skills you developed in the process. Show the value you can add to an employer.

Get someone to check your spelling and grammar. No-one wants to read a CV that is squashed together and hard to read. Your CV should be easy to read with space between each section, have plenty of white space. 

Put your experience, education and achievements in reverse chronologiocal order. This means putting your most recent role at the top of your employment history.

When describing your work achievements use power words such as ‘launched’, ‘managed’, ‘co-ordinated’, ‘motivated’, ‘supervised’, and ‘achieved’. 

For example, ‘This reduced the development time from 7 to 3 days’ or ‘This revolutionised the company’s internal structure, and led to a reduction in overheads from $23,000 to $17,000 per year’. 

A lot of recruitment companies and employers are utlising the latest tech to screen applications. Not all do this, but a lot have taken to AI. Think about the language you're using and how your CV is constructed. 

Such as date of birth, marital status, race, gender, location, disability. This information is not relevant to your ability to do the job and quite frankly, is no ones business but your own. Leave it off.

Leave this for conversations with your Recruiter or Hiring Manager. We always encourage our candidates to be transparent about their salary expectations, but avoid putting this on a CV, cover letter or in a first interview with the employer. 

Keep your CV to 2-4 pages. Keep your CV relevant and customised for the role you're applying for and where you're at in your career. Steer clear of 'fluff'. Don't include information just for the sake of it - to make your experience seem like more than it is. 

We don't need to know about your paper run when you were 16 or where you went to High School 20 years ago. Concentrate on demonstrating the skills they need, and what benefits your team/clients have gained from your work.

Some use of jargon, acronyms and technical terms could be relevant, however, the Recruiter reading your CV might not know the terms you are using. Plain English is essential to ensure your message is portrayed correctly.

Employers have ways of checking what you put in your CV is true, and they are entitled to terminate your employment if they find out you've lied to them about something that could directly relate to your work.

Unfortunately, we are all capable of unconscious bias. Although your headshot may be lovely, it can allow an employer to make a judgement on your looks instead of your ability to do the job. 

Keep those referee details to yourself until an employer, Recruiter or Hiring Manager asks for your permission to contact them. Your references should be one of the final stages of a recruitment process. This coincides with the new Privacy Act.