Perfecting Your Nursing Resume

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The format of resumes has changed over the years, and now may be a great time to revamp your nursing resume. Below we’ll outline the dos and don’ts of nurse resume building, as well as what should and shouldn’t be included. You’ll also find some great tips for word choice and how to make your resume stand out from the crowd.

5 Sections Your Nurse Resume Must Include

Whether you’re trying for your first contract or are an experienced travel nurse, your resume should highlight your flexibility, adaptability, initiative and exceptional skill. Start by ensuring your resume is strong in these five key areas:

1. Professional Summary

The first part of the resume should be a summary to highlight your strengths and what you bring to the table. If you’re a brand new nurse, summarize any skills or experiences you’ve had that can be applied to nursing. For example, if you were a waitress, you may list “good at multitasking,” “works well in a fast-paced environment,” or “exceptional customer service skills” in this section.

Any description of your experience, professional organization associations, travel history and advanced certifications you hold is important to include. If there’s something specific that you want to make sure the manager sees, this is the place to put it. For example, I’ve been fortunate enough to have been chosen BOTH times that The Joint Commission came to my hospital for a stroke survey. I list this experience in my summary because it shows that I’m aware of the national standards of care and accreditation requirements. Because this section is the first thing the facility will read, customize it and draw the recruiter in with something unique about your nursing career. This section can be formatted as either a bulleted list or a short paragraph.

2. Relevant Work Experience

New grad nurses may struggle with what’s “relevant.” If you’ve never worked as a nurse, we recommend listing at least your past two jobs with brief descriptions. You can also include any nursing school clinical experiences that may have been unique or highlight your ambition.

RELATED: Our Get Hired with an Amazing New Grad Nurse Resume guide helps graduate nurses learn how to stand out.

More experienced nurses can list all their previous nursing positions, with more detailed descriptions of recent jobs and less detail for jobs over five years ago. The description of your role should include any charge nursing duties or preceptor experience and a general explanation of your responsibilities in each position. If you really want to stand out, change the description of each of your jobs to better match the skills and culture of each job you’re applying for. Employers love seeing resumes that match their mission.

3. Education & Licenses

Add the degrees you’ve been awarded, where you obtained them and the month and year you graduated from the program. You can also opt to add your GPA. Any additional or ongoing education can be included to demonstrate your commitment to continual growth in your education and career.

List your current state nursing licenses so the employer knows you’re ready to work in their location. Some resources recommend listing all nursing licenses you’ve ever held. I personally don’t think this is necessary since a manager can presume if I was employed as a nurse in another state that I held a license there.

4. Skills, Awards & Certifications

Here you can list your Basic Life Support (BLS), Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) and Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) certifications, along with their expiration dates. Nurses should also list any specialty or advanced certifications they have, such as Certification in Acute/Critical Care Nursing (CCRN), Trauma Nursing Core Course (TNCC), Certified Emergency Nurse (CEN), etc. If you’ve won any unit, hospital or community-based awards, you can list them here, as well. Be sure to include all the EHR systems you’ve worked with and any unique technology you’ve used in your career.

5. Activities & Interests

This section is the perfect place to write a few sentences about your goals or any volunteer work you may be involved in. If you own your own business or have a real passion outside of nursing, you can describe that in this section. This space is also a great place to write about your love of travel if you’re applying for a travel nurse contract. If the recruiter is interested and reading your resume, this section is a fantastic place to give an employer a glimpse of who you are.

Tip: Consider adding some of the info in your activities section along with the summary details to your “About Me” section of your Vivian Reusable Profile.

How Long Should Your Resume Be?

Opinions vary on the optimal length of a resume, but 1 to 2 pages is the norm. Include all relevant job history and any special skills and certifications you’ve obtained. Use enough length to provide a full picture of your nursing career.

If you’ve only had one nursing job, make sure to list all your responsibilities, any floating experience and skills that impress and could be useful in any hospital. Examples include procedural sedation, IV insertion, charge duties, precepting experience, continuing education classes and whether you were extra flexible for scheduling needs, overtime, etc. For travel nurses, you want to give the hiring managers the impression that you can just breeze onto their unit and start taking care of patients. Showcase your amazing teamwork, organization and prioritization talents.

New graduate nurses can keep it short and sweet. Make sure to include any awards or recognition you received in nursing school. Try to keep the summary and activities section relevant to nursing and tailor them to the jobs for which you’re applying.

Practice Talking About Your Resume

Be prepared to answer questions about your resume during interviews. You should be familiar with the content of the resume so you can provide more details when asked. Obviously, don’t embellish or include anything you can’t back up with solid experience. The trick is making your existing skills look bright and shiny to attract the hiring manager’s attention and get that interview.

Take the time to brush up on your interviewing skills and become confident in your answers. Our series How to Answer Common Nursing Interview Questions: Part 1 and Part 2 is an excellent primer, with 20 common nursing interview questions and tips on how to answer them.

How to Format a Nurse Resume

When you sit down to pick a template for your resume, keep it simple. And, yes, you should use a template. Don’t just type something into a simple document without any formatting. A poorly formatted resume won’t snag an employer’s attention, or at least not in a positive way. If you’re stumped, a quick search will bring up dozens of resume template examples.

The top of your nursing resume should include your brief summary. A paragraph or bullet points are acceptable here. Follow with your experience, education and skills/awards/certificates sections. You can break these into three different sections if your resume is on the shorter side. Keep the headings traditional and easy to skim. A photo is optional but generally isn’t necessary to include. In fact, some employers ask applicants not to include a photo to avoid any bias or discrimination in hiring.

Choose a black and white template or one with very little color. For example, the only color on my resume is the title of my position at each job. Use plain bullet points (no emojis or stars) and select a simple font like Arial, Times New Roman, Helvetica or Calibri. Cursive fonts are hard to read and distracting, and childish fonts like Comic Sans will take the reader’s attention away from the content of your resume. Your resume is about you and your career. You never want the font to negatively impact the reader’s opinion of you.

I hope it goes without saying that you should proofread and check the spelling on your nurse resume. Have someone else proofread it and/or run your document through an editing app to double check it. A spelling or grammar error is enough for many employers to toss the resume aside.

Since it’s the 21st century, I can’t leave out technology. Software developers have created something called the “applicant tracking system” (ATS) to help recruiters quickly sort through resumes without having to actually read them. You must include headings, phrases and keywords that this AI-based system will pick up on and rank you as a top prospect.

RELATED: Watch our How to Build a Winning Resume webinar.

Get Noticed with a Custom Resume

If you really want to wow a manager or rank high in an automated ATS, customize your nursing resume to a specific facility and/or job posting. If you’re a travel nurse, this requires knowing which facility you’re trying to gain employment with or those in the work location where you want to travel. You can then alter your resume to fit each hospital’s description. Although it seems like a lot of work, when the market is super competitive, tailoring your resume may make the difference between you getting a contract or not.

The ATS scans your resume against a specific job description, so make sure they’re aligned. Take the main points from the job description and fit them into your resume and work experience to show how your experience is the perfect fit for the role. Skills such as “knowledge of nursing theory,” “critical thinking skills,” “knowledge of regulatory standards and compliance requirements” and “interpersonal skills” are often listed in job descriptions, so be sure your resume includes these keywords or any other phrases the employer has specifically listed.

RELATED: Read Using AI to Write a Great Healthcare Resume for some great tips and ideas.

For nurses applying to staff RN jobs, look for keywords on the hospital’s website and check its mission statement. Try to align your description with the facility’s mission. If you market yourself to their essentials and goals of care, your resume should be picked up and looked at with regard. For instance, if a facility’s website boasts objectives and accolades for its stroke care program, highlight the stroke-related experience in your career. Or, if the mission statement has multiple mentions of giving back to the community, mention your volunteer work so you come across as benevolent and compassionate on your resume.

Another good tip is to use the right verbs and action words. Rather than saying you “took a course on hemodynamics,” say you “completed a hemodynamics course.” Words like accomplished, lead, guided, participated, educated, developed, launched, managed, supervised, assisted, improved and similar attention-grabbing words can give your resume appeal. Tap into the thesaurus to vary your word choice and find the best words to highlight your experience.

Once your resume is ready, let Vivian help simplify the process and remove the busywork of multiple job applications by creating a Vivian Reusable Profile that lets recruiters know you’re fully prepared and ready to get to work.

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