In a poll of 121 finance hiring managers, 52% said role alignment is the first thing they look for in a CV and 39% said impact. Industry experience came last at 3%. Write the CV that reads as someone who can do that role, then let the numbers confirm it.
The market you are actually applying into
Over the last two years the biggest cost lever businesses pulled was senior finance. Most of the CFO and Head of Finance redundancies I have seen happened in that window, and it happened across every sector, not just tech or startups. Removing one senior finance role saves north of $200,000 immediately on paper, which is exactly why it kept happening.[1]
The work did not disappear. The strategic half moved up, absorbed by a CEO or COO on top of the day job: board reporting, capital allocation, investor relations. The day to day moved down, rehired at a lower salary point as a Finance Business Partner, a Senior Accountant or a Senior Analyst.[2] A couple of hundred thousand saved on paper, with a real hidden cost in what those senior people used to do.
Add the macro pile-on that has been building for three years, trade wars, tariffs, the Middle East and an AI endgame nobody can call, and you get replacement hiring as the norm and growth hiring stalled. It is not that businesses stopped wanting good finance people. The case for adding one just has to be much sharper to get across the line.
Which brings the important point for anyone in a search right now. If you are measuring yourself against 2021 and 2022, you are measuring against a market that no longer exists. That was the craziest market on record. Same quality of candidates today, far fewer jobs, and none of that is a reflection on your candidacy.
For the wider read on how the Australian finance market is moving, see the finance recruitment trends guide.
What hiring managers look for first
I asked 121 finance hiring managers on LinkedIn what the first thing they look for in a CV is. Role alignment took 52%. Impact and achievements took 39%. Longevity in prior roles took 4%, and similar industry experience took 3%.[3]
The result surprises most candidates, because the ranking is the reverse of what they optimise for. Alignment beating achievements does not mean achievements do not matter. It means the first question is whether the document reads as someone who can do this role. Get that right and the achievements confirm it. If the CV reads generic, no amount of impressive numbers rescues it. And the two at the bottom, longevity and sector, matter far less than candidates assume. Chase the top two.
| What most candidates spend the space on | What the hiring manager is actually scanning for | |
|---|---|---|
| Role alignment | Assumed to be obvious from the job titles, so the CV never spells it out. | The first thing 52% of hiring managers look for. The top third has to read as someone who can do this role. |
| Impact and achievements | Duty lists lifted from the position description. | Named at 39%. Three to five quantified outcomes per recent role, which confirm the alignment. |
| Longevity | Explained and defended at length in the summary. | 4%. Rarely the reason a CV is put down. |
| Similar industry experience | Justified in the opening paragraph. | 3%. The least important of the four. Stop spending space on it. |
Where a recruiter actually looks
A CV is read in zones. Name, headline and summary get read every time. The most recent role gets skimmed for keywords. Older roles and education only get read if the first two zones earned it. If the top third is generic or hard to scan, nobody reaches the good material underneath.
So the single highest-leverage change most candidates can make is rewriting the top third. Not redesigning the document, not adding another page. The first third.
The structure that survives the scan
Contact block, professional summary of three to four lines, career experience in reverse chronological order, qualifications, systems and technical skills, then optional extras. The common mistakes are putting qualifications above experience when you are not a graduate, burying the summary under a wall of personal interests, and listing systems as one long comma-separated string.
On length, the one-page rule is an American convention that stops working past about ten years of experience, and it got amplified by people like Elon Musk. Three to five pages is fine if the detail is relevant.[4] Allocation matters more than the total: the last five years in depth with five to ten responsibility points and three to five achievement points per role, five to ten years ago compressed to key achievements only, and anything beyond ten years as one line of role, company and dates.
Two-column templates are a trap. The dark sidebar takes 30 to 35% of every page whatever is in it, and when the sidebar runs out of personal details it sits empty while the main column keeps going. The same content that fits comfortably in a single-column two-page CV stretches to three. Some applicant tracking systems also read columns left to right, top to bottom, and scramble the order.[5] Single column, standard fonts, full page width, no photo. Nobody in finance is passing on a CV because it is not colourful enough.
Write the business problem you solved
Every role exists to solve a business problem. An AP Officer solves late and inaccurate payments. An Accountant solves a slow month end. A CFO solves capital and profitability. Your CV is the evidence you solved yours, at whatever level you are at.
| Duty as written | The same role, written as evidence | |
|---|---|---|
| AP Officer | Processed accounts payable invoices. | Processed 300 invoices a week at 100% accuracy. Automated Excel processes cut processing time by 40%. |
| Accountant | Assisted with month-end close. | Reduced month-end close from 9 to 5 working days through process improvements. |
| CFO | Involved in capital raising. | Led a Series A raise of circa $10M AUD via venture capital partners. |
Estimation is completely fine. If you do not remember the exact figure, round it and write circa. Nobody is calling your old employer to fact-check the number.[6] Words like significant or dramatically improved read differently to everyone, and a metric removes the ambiguity: accuracy, time saved, cost cut, revenue up, margin up.
Systems and qualifications
Group your systems by function rather than listing forty in one line: ERP, BI and analytics, automation and AI, planning and consolidation. Use the exact product names, not abbreviations, because recruiters search on them as filters. My rule of thumb is that if you could not do a live demo of the tool tomorrow, leave it off.
On credentials, lead with the designation recruiters filter on: CA, CPA, CIMA, ACCA, and the equivalent from your home institute. Full designation, awarding body, year. Include post-graduate specialisations, CFA level if you are progressing, and executive programs at recognised schools. Skip short online courses, compliance training and anything more than fifteen years old that is not core.
For what the Australian market actually requires at Finance Director level, see the finance director qualifications guide.
Why LinkedIn now matters more than your CV
Your CV is only ever seen by the people you send it to. On a good week that is five to twenty people. An optimised LinkedIn profile can be viewed by hundreds a week: recruiters, internal talent teams, hiring managers, founders.[7] Both matter, but if you are only investing in the CV you are ignoring the far bigger channel.
Here is the mechanic candidates never see. A client gives me a shopping list of five key skills for a role, technical terms like securitisation, treasury management, acquisition accounting, work in progress, IFRS 17. I run a keyword and skill search. If your profile carries all five a couple of times each, you come up on page one and get contacted first. Two or three of them puts you on page five to ten. None of them puts you on page fifty, which is invisible.[8]
A real search for a senior treasury or structured finance role is three groups joined by AND: job title variants, domain skills, and technical specialisation terms. Within each group the terms are joined by OR, so you only need one to match. Match all three groups and you are on page one. Match titles only, with no skill or specialisation language anywhere on the profile, and you drop out of the shortlist before a human ever reads you.
The four fields that do the work
Headline. It defaults to your job title, which wastes the most valuable field on the profile. Use role, then industry or sector, then key systems, then what you are known for. Every element is a term someone searches on. Finance Manager at ABC Pty Ltd tells a recruiter nothing that the profile does not already say.
About. Three parts in order: a summary of three to five sentences on your experience and how you work, three to six key achievements or projects with metrics, then niche skills only. At senior level the achievements are M&A, capital raises, market entries, transformations, system implementations and governance, named in the technical vocabulary. Steer away from communication and strategic leadership. Every other candidate has those.
Experience. This is not the place to shrink. Carry 50 to 60% of your CV detail here in expanded language, with metrics on every achievement, and put the achievements that did not fit the About section here. Every system, standard and methodology named is another chance to be found.
Skills. The hidden gem. LinkedIn gives you 100 slots and most people use about 15.[9] It is a free hit at keyword coverage. Skip communication, leadership, accounting and Excel, load up on reporting standards, data tools, systems, project methodologies, regulatory acronyms and sector concepts. If you can talk about it for two minutes it is fair game. When LinkedIn nags you to attach each skill to a specific role, skip it and just add the skill.
Two things a recruiter takes in before reading a word: your photo and your headline. Professional, clear, recent and face visible is the whole brief. A ten-year-old photo signals you are not really on the platform. Nobody is passing on you because of your banner, and if you do not have a headshot you can generate a passable one in Canva.
For how we work with finance professionals on a move rather than an application, see the candidates page.
Using AI without getting binned
AI is a productivity multiplier for the search, not a substitute for you. It compresses ninety minutes of CV tailoring into fifteen and forty-five minutes of outreach drafting into ten. The judgement stays yours. One place to deliberately under-invest is the cover letter. Most recruiters, me included, do not read many. If a role asks for one, draft it with AI and move on.
The workflow I recommend has three steps. Build a long-form base CV of around ten pages holding every role, achievement, project and metric. You will never send it. It is the source of truth. Then create a project or thread per role you apply for, drop the job description in, and ask for a tailored CV pulling only from the long-form document. That word is what stops the invention.[10] Finally, review for hallucination and voice: every claim must trace back to something in the long-form, and anything that reads like a machine gets rewritten.
The setup takes about 45 minutes once. A paid account at around $20 a month is the part people skip, and the free tiers do not hold context or memory across sessions, which breaks the whole workflow. Add the long-form CV, a project per role, and a voice sample of three paragraphs of your own writing with an instruction to match that tone every time.[11] On tools, I use Claude because the language comes out more natural, and ChatGPT and Codex are sharper on analysis. Both work. Pick one.
The tells that get an application binned are consistent: heavy em dashes, delve and leverage and unlock, every sentence built as a list of three, sycophantic openings like great question or I hope this message finds you well, and generic praise of the company with no proof you looked.[12] The single best test is to read it aloud. If it does not sound like you saying it in the room, it is not ready. AI is your first draft, never your final one.
Same rules for outreach. Recruiters see hundreds of messages a week. Personalise the first line against something specific, lead with what you bring rather than what you want, and make one clear ask. A specific fifteen minute conversation is far easier to say yes to than asking to pick someone's brain.
What to do this week
Do not try to redo everything. Rewrite the top third of the CV, being the summary, the most recent role and the headline achievements. Fix the LinkedIn headline so it carries role, sector, systems and a differentiator instead of your job title. Rebuild the About and Skills sections around the words recruiters actually search. Then set up the AI stack once, with a saved prompt for CV tailoring and for company and interview research. That is a strong week of work and it will move your search.
The slides from this session are available as a PDF, free and ungated like everything else in our guides library. This session was delivered to the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, Australian Chapter and to CPA Women in Business. If your institute, chapter or finance team wants it run live, get in touch.
Common questions
What do finance hiring managers look at first on a CV?
Role alignment. In a poll of 121 finance hiring managers, 52% said alignment to the role is the first thing they look for, 39% said impact and achievements, 4% said longevity in prior roles and 3% said similar industry experience. The practical implication is that the top third of the CV has to read as someone who can do that specific role, and the achievements then confirm it.
How long should an accounting or finance CV be in Australia?
The one-page rule is an American convention that stops working past about ten years of experience. Three to five pages is fine when the detail is relevant. Allocation matters more than the total length: the last five years in depth with five to ten responsibility points and three to five achievement points per role, five to ten years ago compressed to key achievements, and anything older reduced to a single line of role, company and dates.
Are two-column CV templates a problem?
Yes, for two reasons. The fixed sidebar consumes 30 to 35% of every page regardless of what is in it, and it sits empty once the personal details run out, so content that fits a two-page single-column CV stretches to three. Some applicant tracking systems also read columns left to right and top to bottom, which scrambles the reading order. Single column with standard fonts and full page width is cleaner, faster and safer.
How do recruiters actually search LinkedIn?
With Boolean keyword and skill searches built from the client's shopping list. A typical senior search combines three groups joined by AND: job title variants, domain skills such as securitisation or wholesale funding, and technical specialisation terms such as liquidity management or interest rate risk. Profiles carrying terms from all three groups surface on page one. Matching two or three terms puts you around pages five to ten, and matching none puts you past page fifty.
How many skills should I list on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn allows up to 100 and most people use about 15, which wastes the single easiest keyword win on the platform. Skip generic entries like communication, leadership, accounting and Excel because every candidate has them. Use reporting standards, data and BI tools, ERP systems, project methodologies, regulatory acronyms and sector-specific concepts instead. A useful rule is that if you can talk about it for two minutes, it belongs there.
Can I use AI to write my CV?
Yes, as a first draft and never as the final one. Build a long-form base CV of around ten pages that you never send, then for each application ask the model to draft a tailored version pulling only from that document, which is what prevents invention. Review every claim back to the long-form, and edit for voice. Recruiters now recognise the tells: em dashes, words like delve and leverage, lists of three in every sentence, sycophantic openings and generic praise with no specifics.
References
- What I have watched happen across the market over the last two years: senior finance was the biggest cost lever, most of the CFO and Head of Finance redundancies I saw happened in that window, across every sector rather than only tech, and removing one senior finance role saves over $200,000 immediately on paper.
- The pattern I have seen repeat when a senior finance role is removed: the strategic work shifts up to the CEO or COO on top of their day job, and the day-to-day work shifts down to individual contributor rehires such as Finance Business Partners, Senior Accountants and Senior Analysts at a lower salary point.
- Our own market data: I polled 121 finance hiring managers on what they look for first in a CV. Role alignment 52%, impact and achievements 39%, longevity in prior roles 4%, similar industry experience 3%.
- My position on CV length for finance and accounting careers: the one-page rule is an American convention that largely stops working past ten years of experience, and three to five pages is fine provided the detail is relevant and allocated to the most recent five years.
- What I see when candidates send me designed templates: the dark sidebar on a two-column CV takes 30 to 35% of every page regardless of content, stretching a comfortable two-page document to three, and some applicant tracking systems read columns left to right and scramble the reading order.
- The advice I give on quantifying achievements: estimation is completely fine. Round the figure and write circa. Nobody is calling your old employer to fact-check it, and a metric removes the ambiguity that words like significant leave behind.
- How the two channels compare in practice: a CV is only seen by the people you send it to, which is five to twenty a week on a good week, while an optimised LinkedIn profile can be viewed by hundreds of recruiters, hiring managers and internal talent teams in the same period.
- How a search actually runs on my side: a client gives me a shopping list of five key skills, I run a keyword and skill search, and a profile carrying all five a couple of times each comes up on page one. Two or three of them lands around pages five to ten. None of them is effectively invisible.
- The most under-used field on the platform: LinkedIn gives you up to 100 skill slots and most people fill about 15, so every unused slot is a search term you could have been found on.
- The exact AI workflow I use and recommend: build a ten-page long-form CV you never send, create a project per role with the job description in it, and instruct the model to draft the tailored version using only what is in the long-form document. The word only is what stops the hallucination.
- My practical setup advice: a paid account at around $20 a month is non-negotiable because free tiers do not hold context or memory across sessions, and a voice sample of three paragraphs of your own writing with an instruction to match that tone is what stops the output reading as AI.
- The tells I now spot immediately in candidate CVs and outreach: heavy em dashes, corporate-AI vocabulary such as delve, leverage and unlock, every sentence built as a list of three, sycophantic openings, and generic praise of the company with no evidence the candidate looked.