A Complete Nursing Resume Guide
05 January 20225 min read
Wisedoc
Wisedoc
Wisedoc Expert team

With the growing competition for the best nursing jobs, finding one is not a cakewalk. The opportunities are massive, and employers have diverse needs. You need to convince the hiring managers that you have more than just the right licenses, you need to show them that you are a perfect registered nurse for that specific hospital or clinic.

In this era of online applications and robotic resume readers, crafting a nursing resume that portrays all your skills, accomplishments in a very impressive is always a challenging task.

Follow these steps to write the Registered nurse resume that gets noticed by potential employers and gets you multiple interview calls.

What to Expect From Your 5-Minute Read:
  1. How to Write a Resume Objective
  2. How to Mention Skills
  3. Qualifying Your Experience
  4. Organize According to Ancc Preferences
  5. Additional Sections to Add
Strong Resume Objective Showcasing Your Experience

Hiring managers glance through your resume just for 6 seconds. Your resume needs to be built very appealingly to grab their attention. For that, you need to begin your resume with a crisp and clear introduction that summarizes all your education, experience, skills, and licensure.

Here is an example for an Experienced nurse career objective:

Established Professional Nurse seeking to take eight years of hospital experience and apply it to a teaching clinic. I'm hoping to use my significant experience to teach and excite students about best practices in patient care.

Example for a new grad nursing resume:

Recent nursing graduate with relevant EMT experience who is kind and thoughtful. Seeking an opportunity to work in George Washington University’s emergency department to gain further experience with critical care patients while providing empathetic and dignified care.

Example for a nurse with clinical experience:

Clinical Nurse with extensive experience seeking a position at Harris OBGYN. Working in a fast-paced emergency room and bringing my dedication and compassion to patients.

Highlighting Skills

Hard and soft skills will be highlighted in a strong nursing resume.. A lot of your job depends on performing specific duties, and the recruiter will hone in on those when scanning your resume.

The best nursing resumes can incorporate a professional accomplishment with a skill.

Hard Skills: It display your understanding of job-specific roles and obligations (such as taking vital signs or administering medication).

Soft Skills: It demonstrate your personality fit within the team (such as communication or leadership skills).

Quantify Your Experience

When possible, use quantitative measurements to show your successes rather than just outlining your obligations with bullet points.

The second example is more specific and detailed. It gives your employer a good idea as to your efficiency. Also, “administered” evokes more responsibility than “helped.” For more on this kind of action verb, check out another article 400+ Action Verbs to Empower Your Resume.

Organize According to ANCC Preferences

Luckily, the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) has a standardized order for how you should list your nursing credentials on your resume.

List your education and credentials according to this order:

Highest degree earnedAdd any lower-level or less relevant degrees below.

Licensure - This includes registered nurse (RN) and licensed practical nurse (LPN). Include your licenses in your education section or a dedicated “Licenses” section. Keeping both the education and license sections separate is always a plus.

State designations or requirements - State designations or requirements show that you can practice at an advanced level in certain states. Examples include APRN (advanced practice registered nurse) or NP (nurse practitioner).

National Certifications - List your certifications in a dedicated section on your resume. This includes any certification you’ve received through bodies accredited by the ANCC.

Awards and Honors - If you’ve received any honors or awards, list them in a dedicated section.

Other Recognitions-Finally, list any other relevant non-nursing certifications, such as EMT-Basic/EMT certification.

Additional Sections to Add

You may feel like you’ve put a lot of effort into your resume until this point. Yes, you have! Since you’re trying to land the perfect nursing job, you want to make sure that you round out your resume and stand out from the crowd.

The other sections you should add to your resume are:

Conferences and Courses

List any additional terms you have completed as a nurse and any conferences you may have attended or even spoken at.

Languages

The ability in speaking multiple languages gives you a leg up over your other nursing competition. Don’t hesitate to put in if you know other languages and designate your level of proficiency.

Hobbies

An employer is hiring a human being, not a robot. They want to hire someone with who they can get along, so listing your hobbies and interests may serve you well. Additionally, listing a hobby might give your supervisor an idea of whether you’d be a good culture fit on the team.

Before you wrap up your resume, make sure you proofread it, and if you can, have someone else read it over for you. You don’t want your resume to get rejected because you spelled “stethoscope” wrong.

Here, in wisedoc, our collaborative writing feature helps you in sharing your resume to your peers/friends directly and save you a ton of a time.

Lastly, when saving your resume, make sure you save it as a word document or PDF or as asked by the employer compared to any alternative, older file.

Read: Beginners Guide For Writing A Stunning Resume In 2022.

The best fonts for an ATS-Friendly (Applicant tracking system) resume are Times New Roman or Arial

Our last parting wisdom to you is to have a cover letter that complements your resume.

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Wisedoc
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Wisedoc Expert team
Wisedoc's team of experts organizes the key learnings of career growth from recruiter's point of view and help users to add right content in their career profiles.