Original data · updated 7 September 2026

What Australian senior job ads actually ask for

By Hillel Lithwick, founder of ApexHunt · Melbourne

ApexHunt scores real CVs against real job ads for senior roles in Australia. This page reports what that data shows: 212 scored applications, 1,053 individually identified CV gaps, and 36 rewrites with a measured before-and-after score. Not survey answers, and not scraped listings: the ads senior candidates actually chose to pursue, scored against their actual CVs.

The keywords that keep appearing

For every scored ad, the scorer extracts the 8 to 10 most important keywords a hiring system or recruiter would filter on. Across the dataset, these came up most:

Two things stand out. First, the soft-sounding phrases are not filler: "team leadership" and "stakeholder management" outrank every hard skill except ecommerce itself, and ads treat them as screenable requirements. Second, named platforms punch far above their weight: Shopify appears as a hard requirement as often as P&L management does.

Where senior CVs actually fall short

Every scored application produces a gap analysis: the specific requirements in the ad that the CV does not evidence. Classifying all 1,053 gap findings by pattern (the classifier is part of the saved query, so the shares are approximate, and it leaves the role-specific tail unclassified on purpose):

The two most common patterns in why a strong senior CV scores below a role are not experience. One issector wording: the ad says "FMCG" or "retail" or "B2B" and the CV describes the same work without ever using the word. The other is a named tool the candidate may well have used and never wrote down. These are writing problems wearing the costume of experience problems, which is exactly why an honest gap analysis is worth more than another round of polishing.

What a typical match looks like

Across the 212 scored applications, the median match score is 72 out of 100. About 40% of saved roles score 75 or higher, and only 7% score under 50: senior candidates mostly pursue roles they genuinely fit. The interesting territory is the 20-point band in the middle, where an interview-worthy candidate reads as a marginal one on paper.

How much tailoring actually moves the score

Of the CV rewrites with a measured before-and-after score against the same frozen rubric, the median improvement is +7 points, and the average is +10, across 36 measured rewrites from 27 external users, and one in four came out lower, mostly CVs that already scored 80 or above. For a mid or weak start, that is usually the difference between sitting just under a screening threshold and sitting comfortably above it, and it comes almost entirely from evidencing what the candidate has already done in the words the ad uses, not from embellishment.

What to do with this

Before applying for a senior role: check the ad for named tools and platforms and make sure every one you have touched is on the CV in exactly the ad's words; state your sector in the words the ad uses; put a number on the size of every team you have led; and separate setting strategy from delivering it, with evidence for whichever the ad asks for.

Or check where you actually stand first: score your CV free, and see your own gap list against a real role.

Sources and further reading

• Jobs and Skills Australia, 2025 Occupation Shortage List: 29% of assessed occupations were in national shortage in 2025, down from 33% in 2024, and Professionals made up 46% of the occupations in shortage in both years.
• Australian Industry Group, Election 2025 skills policy: Ai Group's 2024 skills survey found 61% of businesses had difficulty finding Professionals and 58% had difficulty finding Managers.

Methodology and honest limits

Numbers computed on 10 September 2026 from ApexHunt's production data by a saved, versioned query (scripts/guide-figures.mjs in the codebase), external users only: 212 job ads with full descriptions saved and scored by 78 people, 1,053 gap findings across those analyses, and 36 rewrite pairs (one per person and role) carrying a canonical before-and-after match score against an identical frozen rubric. All figures are aggregates; no individual CV, user or application is identifiable.

The honest caveat: our users skew toward senior retail, ecommerce and marketing roles, mostly in Melbourne and Sydney, so this dataset describes that world best. It is not a census of the whole Australian senior job market, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. That skew describes the published dataset, not the product: ApexHunt scores roles anywhere in Australia, and the analysis works exactly the same for a role in Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra or Hobart as it does in Melbourne or Sydney. A correction: the version of this page published on 18 August 2026 counted the founder's own account and internal test accounts (about one in ten ads and more than half of the rewrite pairs) and reported 190 ads, 929 findings and 134 pairs; its gap table was a hand classification, replaced by the documented pattern one above. The page will be updated as the dataset grows.

Discipline deep-dives from the same dataset: senior ecommerce roles (50 ads, where named platforms dominate) and senior marketing roles (49 ads, where ownership terms dominate).