Perth employers now prioritising skills over employment history, report reveals

Perth locals hunting on the job market are writing resumes wrong, with a critical flaw holding their applications back, a report has revealed.

Recruitment specialists Michael Page detailed in the 2026 talent trends report that Australian employers are shifting how they view potential candidates.

The rise in AI and other useful tools has watered down the authenticity of cover letters and job applications, leading employers to prefer skills over history.

This was prevalent in the report, which revealed that 25 per cent of employers are now prioritising skills over previous employment and education, while 61 per cent judge them equally.

A staggering 97 per cent of employers believe that skills-based hiring drives clear benefits, forcing Aussies to rethink the way they go about job applications.

David George, senior managing director of Michael Page, said that employment history has increasingly become devalued.

“For a long time, a stint at a big-name firm was shorthand for quality; you’d worked there, so you must be good. That’s no longer the case,” he said.

“The question has shifted from ‘Who did you work for’ to ‘What did you learn there, and what can you do with it’?

“Skills-based hiring is choosing people for what they can do and keep learning, rather than where they trained or who they trained under.”

It has led to the death of the old resume, where a bolstered history could all but guarantee a shot at employment.

Now, potential candidates are being pushed to show off what they can bring to the table.

“CVs are now so uniformly perfect, it tells employers almost nothing about the person behind it,” Mr George said.

“A prestigious employer on your resume no longer opens the door on its own . . . the interview is now doing the heavy lifting.”

Brazilian expat Aline Portes noticed this shift when she moved to Australia.

After she worked in the chemical industry for 14 years as a safety advisor, Ms Portes looked for a change of pace.

She now lives in Perth working as a work, health and safety manager at a mushroom producer, despite previously never working in the food space before.

“At the beginning it was a little scary for me, because the role was pretty different from where I come from,” she said.

The drastic switch in careers was a daunting step for the Perth local, but she was able to adapt.

“Many of the things I did before (in my old job), I could pick up and use today in a different scenario,” Ms Portes said.

“It’s similar skills or knowledge that I’ve used before that I can apply in the company today.”