Nursing Resume Examples in 2023

Nursing Resume Examples (Text Format)

Years of Experience

Common Key Skills and Action Verbs for Nursing Resumes

Applying to jobs doesn’t just mean impressing the hiring manager. It means getting past the automation firewall of applicant tracking systems (ATS). An ATS automatically sorts resumes into categories and highlights only those with the right set of keywords, instantly identifying the best matches for each job posting. In practical terms, the more keywords you manage to use in your resume, the more likely you are to make it to the hiring manager’s desk and land an interview. Here are some of the phrases you might want to include to better showcase your skills as a nursing applicant.

Tips for Writing a Better Nursing Resume

Highlight Your Expertise in Patient Care

As a nursing professional, you’ll want to highlight your unique experiences delivering high quality healthcare services to diverse populations. Hospitals value candidates who possess both the medical knowledge and interpersonal skills to drive positive outcomes. In the example below, the candidate showcases their passion and commitment for providing emotional support and empathetic care to patients:

• Achieve patient satisfaction ratings of over 93% YOY, communicate empathetically with diverse patients, and drive the delivery of patient-centered care
• Coordinate events to give long-term patients more entertainment options and activities to raise morale of patients suffering from debilitating illnesses
• Collaborate with local nonprofits on fundraisers to expand the hospital children’s library and incorporate items like tablet computers and game consoles

Quantify Your Nursing Experience on Your Resume

Listing work experience without using numbers and hard data can make it difficult for a hiring manager to get a good idea of your actual skills and abilities. When putting together bullets for your professional experience, be sure to use numbers whenever possible. Think about your experience. How many patients did you see in your unit on a daily basis? How many beds are in your hospital or exam rooms in the practice where you worked? How large was your nursing team? How many new hires did you train? Demonstrating this information can be invaluable on your resume, as you can see in the example below:

• Provide patient-centered care in a medical center with 170 beds and a 1:5 patient ratio and identify opportunities to enhance clinical workflows and reduce length of stay by 5%
• Coordinate with multi-disciplinary teams to reduce average wait times for patients from 40 minutes to 30 minutes by implementing new workflows
• Drive initiatives to enhance the delivery of patient-centered care, deliver education to patients and families, and serve as patient advocate throughout treatment

How to Align Your Resume With the Job Description

Nursing jobs typically refer to registered nurses, though there are jobs for licensed practical and vocational nurses as well. The average annual salary for registered nurses was $77,600 in 2021. Registered nursing jobs are projected to grow 6% by 2031, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A growing elderly population and the emergence of Covid-19 have greatly contributed to the expansion of the healthcare sector.

While the need for nurses is expected to grow, hiring managers may still sort through dozens of resumes to find the best fit. The right mix of skills and experience is critical when hiring, so it’s important to make sure your resume reflects the most important requirements for each potential job.

The best way to tailor your resume for each job posting is by including the skills and experiences that are most important to a prospective employer. How do you tell which requirements are the most important? In general, the information posted first is the most critical, along with any information that might be repeated. To make sure you locate the right skills and use the best keywords, compare your resume to the job posting.