In the words of Will Rogers, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” The nursing job market is no exception to this. Healthcare facilities sift through dozens or even hundreds of applications, and many of these are discarded at first glance. Whether you are a seasoned RN or a young CNA, how you write your resume can make or break your application. With so much to account for, actually making your nursing resume can be daunting at the start. To get you started, we have 7 resume writing tips that nurses should consider, when making their resumes.
You want to tailor your registered nurse resume to a facility’s sensibilities. The only way to accomplish this is by thorough research. Read on their corporate culture, core values and workplace priorities. You can find this explicitly on their website’s mission statement or implicitly in social media posts. Finally, you want to list skill sets and educational requirements that facilities are looking for. For example, an ICU nurse resume must include relevant skills such as treating wounds, advanced life support and more.
Listing your accomplishments on your nursing resume can help employers recognize your potential, while demonstrating your dedication to your craft. Do not be afraid to list relevant honors, awards, professional affiliations and certifications. A CNA resume can list workplace achievements that will leave a strong impression. This can range from answering multiple calls in a day to ensuring patient safety while performing your nursing tasks. If you do volunteer work, listing this experience will show facilities your dedication to helping your community.
Writing a generic, all-encompassing resume is a great way to save on time. This is not going to be the document that you send to companies. Bland, broad-strokes nurse resumes are all but guaranteed to fail. Rather, this gives you a starting point that lets you save on time. From this basic template, you can tweak and modify the contents around your facility’s preferences. You can add or remove strengths to line up with that hospital’s culture, or highlight specific qualifications required by the job opening.
The average recruiter spends six seconds looking at your registered nurse resume. If they see that your application is unstructured or hard-to-read, they will discard your submission instantly. To avoid this, registered nurse resumes must have good formatting and structure.
If you do not know where to start, you can refer to popular templates or nursing resume examples online.
In recent years, large hospitals and healthcare companies have begun using software to sift through the countless RN, LPN and CNA resumes they receive everyday. These programs look for keywords related to open positions. To maximize opportunities, you want to find these keywords and incorporate them into your nurse resume. You can determine these keywords by reviewing the job postings and isolating words and terms that appear more than once. There are also online resources that can help you find and incorporate keywords in a competitive manner. Resume Worded and JobScan are two such examples, and there are many more available to you.
As mentioned above, employers spend little time reading through your registered nurse resume. More often than not they will choose to ignore applications that are too long or wordy. You want to make sure that you provide all the required information in a short, yet informative nursing resume. If possible, you want to keep it all in one page, while maintaining clean and readable formatting.
Formatting and grammatical errors are the last thing you want on your nurse resume. If a recruiter spots these, your chances of employment will drastically go down. Be sure to take the time to review and edit your resume, until you are sure that it is perfect. If possible, having a friend double-check your work can also be a lifesaver.
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