Registered Nurse Resume Examples Of 2022
Jobs for registered nurses are forecast to grow faster than the average for all industries, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics projecting an increase of 7% by 2029. A rise in the number of people with chronic diseases such as diabetes and an increased elderly population are likely causes of the higher demand.
Although opportunities for registered nurses are due to increase, its still important to make sure your resume sets you apart from the competition. A well-written resume is crucial for securing interviews and getting the perfect job offer. Below, youll find downloadable entry-level and experienced registered nurse resumes and tips for crafting your resume to match a specific job description.
Screening Nursing Resumes For Content
First, lets take a look at how healthcare employers screen nursing resumes.
Hiring managers, recruiters and software evaluate nursing resumes based on two general factors. First, they evaluate resumes based on the degree to which the content of the resume matches the job description.
This evaluation process is technical and robotic. Either the resume includes variables the employer seeks or it does not.
Second, they evaluate a resume based on how well it conveys that the candidate can excel at the job. This evaluation process is more subjective.
With that in mind, lets take a look at the content evaluation process nursing resumes typically go through.
Should You Add Projects Interests Or Hobbies To Your Nursing Resume
Most of the time, you don’t need to include projects or interests/hobbies on your resume. However, you may be able to add them depending on your level of experience and the type of role you’re seeking.
If you’re an experienced nurse, you’ve likely gained tangible experience that’s more important than undergraduate projects you’ve completed. Instead, you should highlight your key areas of experience and show your new employer how you’ll impact their business.
In the same vein, you may not need to indicate your hobbies or interests unless it’s encouraged. However, you can gain an advantage over the competition if you have strong qualifications and hobbies that match the company culture.
To help you determine whether or not to include hobbies, visit the company’s website and read the “About Us” section to gauge whether they have a unique cultural fit.
If you’re an entry-level candidate or a recent graduate, listing hobbies and projects can help you fill space and showcase your personality. However, it’s always good to review the job description to ensure these additions are relevant. Either way, keep the project and hobbies lists short and at the bottom of your resume.
Examples of hobbies/interests:
- Work experience bullets
To recap, each job description comes with different skill requisites. Furthermore, remember to note keywords you can use within the body of your resume and cover letter.
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Skills To Include On Your Rn Resume
Review an example of a resume highlighting the candidate’s nursing skills, and read below for a list of five of the most important nursing skills, as well as a longer list of other skills employers seek when hiring nurses and nurse practitioners. Develop these skills and emphasize them in job applications, resumes, cover letters, and interviews.
Having a combination of these hard and soft skills will set you up to be a successful nurse or nurse practitioner, and the closer a match your credentials are to what the employer is looking for, the better your chances of getting hired.
What Is The Best Resume Format For Nurses
The best resume formats for nurses are the chronological resume and the combination resume. We urge nurses to avoid the functional resume format.
Now, youll see many articles on nursing resumes that recommend functional resumes for new-grads, nurses making career transitions, and nurses reentering the workforce after some time away. While this is the generally accepted recommendation for all industries, we believe its not a good choice for nurses.
First, if youre a new-grad, then you can add your clinical rotations in lieu of work history. New-grads can also include work history outside the healthcare field. Select this link to view our article for new-grad and student nursing resumes.
Second, most nursing employers will only consider skills that the candidate utilized on the job within the last 2 to 3 years. As a result, a skills-based resume wont work for new-grads or nurses who are reentering the workforce after many years away.
The only reason we can imagine for nurses to use a functional resume format is if they are not a new-grad and have absolutely no work history to list. This is a very rare scenario. Again, we urge nurses to use the chronological and combination resume formats.
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Computer Skills And Certifications
There is no doubt that nurses need computer skills to perform some of their duties. They need to update patient records on the database and access patient information before attending to them. If you have these skills, add them under this section to ensure that the recruiter sees them quickly.
The right certifications on your resume will put you ahead of your competition. While you can add them to the education section, having them in a separate section is always better to make them more visible. Here are some certifications that will make your resume stand out.
- Acute Care Nurse Practitioner
- Certified Childbirth Educator
Matching Your Nursing Resume To Job Requirements
Other websites make it sound like you only need to match the content of your resume to the content in the job posting. Doing so, they say, will ensure your resume includes all the content the employer seeks.
Unfortunately, its not that simple. First, employers dont always include every detail theyre looking for in the job description.
For example, many nursing managers want to know if candidates have experience on units with a similar number of beds to their unit. Therefore, resumes that include this information will get more attention. However, you will rarely if ever see a job description that mentions the number of beds in the unit.
Second, some job descriptions are so massive that you wont be able to fit all the information on a resume even IF you had all the desired skills and experiences. As a result, youll be stuck wondering what to include.
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Creating A List From Employer Research
The truth is that employer research is most useful for job interviews. However, it doesnt hurt to conduct employer research to help with your nursing resume.
When conducting employer research for your nursing resume, you want to find details about the employer that converge with your own experience. When youre successful, its a great way to differentiate yourself and gain an edge over other candidates.
Unfortunately, every employer and individual are different. Therefore, we wont be able to provide an exact example. However, here is a list of considerations:
Accomplishments Vs Duties On Your Nursing Resume
Its important to note that the conventional wisdom on resumes contends that your resume should be accomplishment driven. Advocates of this approach advise against listing skills and duties on your resume.
However, nursing is a skills-based profession. Healthcare employers need to know that you have experience with the highly technical skills theyre seeking.
At the same time, healthcare employers want to know about your accomplishments too.
Fitting all of this information on your nursing resume is a major challenge. Managing this challenge represents a key difference between nursing resumes and most other resumes.
There are two key solutions to this problem. First, there are certain critical details that every nursing resume should include when applicable. These critical details implicitly convey tons of information so you dont need to list your duties and skills. We discuss these details below.
Second, use your creative writing skills to frame your nursing skills and duties within statements that convey your accomplishments whenever possible. Essentially, you knock out two birds with one stone. We provide specific examples below.
And remember, not everything on your resume needs to be an accomplishment. The point is to make sure youre thinking about your accomplishments and including them when you can. This is what will make your nursing resume stand out from the crowd.
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Helpful Resume Tips To Avoid Common Mistakes And Make Your Resume Sound Great
The creative resume template provided above will help you to write a great resume. However, there are a few more pieces of advice which are necessary to take into account while doing a letter of application. Although these are less significant, they are not any less important.
Hard Skills For Nurse Resume:
- Assisting in surgery
- Critical thinking
- Physical endurance
- As a general rule, wed recommend not to go overboard with Soft Skills. They are certainly important in the medical field, but they are also harder to back up. Doctors need people with hard skills standing next to them, so give these priority.
Looking for a more comprehensive list? Heres a mega-list of 150+ must-have skills in 2022.
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Important Nursing Skills For Your Resume
Alison Doyle is a job search expert and one of the industry’s most highly-regarded job search and career experts. Alison brings extensive experience in corporate human resources, management, and career development, which she has adapted for her freelance work. She is also the founder of CareerToolBelt.com, which provides simple and straightforward advice for every step of your career.
Nursing is a challenging, rewarding profession that requires a variety of hard skills. Nurses need to have a lot of medical knowledge and need to be able to perform certain procedures . They also need to be tech-savvy, because they often have to update patient charts through a hospitals online database.
Nurses also need some soft skills. They have to be patient and empathetic towards both patients and patients families.
They need to have strong communication skills to relay information to patients and their families, and also to work effectively with doctors and other nurses.
Nursing Resume: Licence Numbers
There is a fair argument around mentioning your license on the resumes for registered nurse.
But as we found, this information is already available as public records, and there is no breach of privacy happening while you mention it.
In fact, mentioning the license number might make the recruiter’s job very easy and may act as a distinguishing element for you.
These five details are necessary while stating License details:-
- Name on the license
- License Expiration Date
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Next Createa Senior Registered Nurse Skills Section On Your Resume
Your resume’s skills section should include the most important keywords from the job description, as long as you actually have those skills. If you haven’t started your job search yet, you can look over resumes to get an idea of what skills are the most important.
Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing your resume’s skills section:
- Include 6-12 skills, in bullet point form
- List mostly hard skills soft skills are hard to test
- Emphasize the skills that are most important for the job
Soft skills are also valuable, as they’re highly transferable and make you a great person to work alongside, but they’re impossible to prove on a resume.
Example Of Senior Registered Nurse Skills For Resume
Honors Awards Special Assignments Volunteer Work:
As with all resumes, a nurses resume should include any honors and awards theyve received. Examples include honors and awards from school, work, volunteer work, professional affiliations, and even social clubs.
Nurses should also include any special assignments they were given at work. Did you ever take charge-duty? Did you do any scheduling, mentoring or precepting?
You should also include honors and awards earned by teams that you contributed to. Did your Emergency Department earn a Lantern Award? Did your hospital achieve Magnet Status during your tenure?
You may choose to place these items under their own heading. However, this isnt necessary. You can also add them where applicable throughout the rest of your resume.
Examples:
Selected as Relief Charge in recognition of demonstrated organizational, leadership and teamwork skills.
Contributed to knowledge management and learning development efforts on a PICU that achieved a gold-level Beacon Award for Excellence during tenure.
Elected President of a Sigma Theta Tau developing honor society and made significant advancements toward chapter status during tenure.
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Listing Education In Your Nurse Resume
Since the nursing profession requires certification and relevant educational background, the educational details you include in your resume are vital to securing the job and will often be the first thing the recruiter confirms through a background check or reference check.
You should include all relevant information about your degree and school, including the exact degree . Make sure to include the date you graduated, or your expected graduation date if you are still a student. You can include scholarships, campus organizations, clinical rotations, and even school-related projects you have completed if you graduated recently.
When including your education details, you should always put your recent degree first. However, if your recent degree is not relevant to the nursing job you are applying for, put the nursing credentials or degree first.
Here’s a sample of how to list your education:
- Bachelor of Science, Nursing
- California State University Sacramento, Sacramento, CA
- Deanâs Award 2019: Exemplary Student
- Received the Elizabeth Moran Award for Excellence â The award is that the school gives the student nominated by the faculty due to the studentâs academic excellence in the study. Also, excellence in problem-solving skills and leadership qualities.
Add Hard Numbers To Your Experience Section
One of the most effective ways to show employers your capabilities and successes as a nurse is to add hard numbers to your work experience section.
For example, when writing your resume, ask yourself the following questions:
- How many patients did you take care of in your unit?
- How many hours did you work per rotation?
- How many nurses did you work with, or train?
Numbers give the hiring manager a clear picture of your skills and abilities because they add context to the accomplishments on your resume.
Heres an example of a bullet point without numbers:
No hard numbers
- Supervised unit of a large psychiatric facility
Here is the same statement with numbers and context added:
With hard numbers
- Supervised up to 10 staff in the 200-bed adolescent unit of a large psychiatric facility, specializing in eating disorders
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Key Takeaways For A Nursing Student Resume
And if you need help polishing your experience on paper, try our field-tested templates and custom builder tool to land your first medical job in no time!
Five Use The Right Formatting And Design
As mentioned, modern resumes need to be formatted to pass an ATS. This includes designing it in a comprehensive way that will not confuse the ATS. We recommend the following design and formatting features:
We recommend the top margin to be set at 1, side margins set to .63. Many experts believe this strikes the perfect balance of text to white space.
ALIGNMENT
Left alignment is standard since thats how most people read. You may think a justified alignment looks tidier, but it can leave uneven gaps between words and ultimately make text harder to read.
LENGTH
In the nursing profession, length should not be the focus of the resume. While we recommend 1-2 pages, some nurses may have resumes with 3 pages. Dont stress over it too much. If the resume is slightly over the page amount by a few lines try changing the margin, font style, font size or shortening statements. Bottom line is, it should look visually appealing and should include keywords.
FONT STYLE
We recommend Times New Roman or Arial to best utilize the functionality of the ATS. However, this is your personal preference. Take note that Times New Roman can be difficult to read if it is smaller than 11pt. If you are striving for a resume that looks visually appealing when printed, there are great ways to achieve that without going overboard with design.
Experienced Travel Nurse with 8 years experience in critical care nursing.
Experienced Travel Nurse with 8 years experience in critical care nursing.
FONT SIZES
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