How to Perfect Your Healthcare Resume
Creating the best healthcare resume possible can be a daunting task, particularly if you're the type of person who only updates their resume once in a blue moon.
Why You Need A Strong Resume
Having a strong resume is the difference between getting considered for a job, or not being considered at all.
In today’s increasingly competitive job marketplace any advantage you can gain over your job seeking competitors is critical to ensure that you have an easy job search. When your job search is easier, you can find healthcare employment faster, and ensure that you are offered the job that you’re truly after.
An effective and strong resume is critical to separating yourself from other candidates due to the fact that it helps summarize your skills, experience, and credentials for the position you are applying for.
In addition, a strong resume will help ensure that you highlight why you should be considered for the position over the other individuals that are applying for the same job.
The healthcare industry is a demanding profession that requires a substantial commitment from each of the employees in a hospital or healthcare facility.
Having a strong resume can help separate yourself from those other candidates who cannot demonstrate your commitment to going above and beyond to serve others in the healthcare industry.
A strong resume will also help you stand out in the eyes of the healthcare recruiters and hiring managers. Healthcare recruiters and hiring managers on average see tens of resumes for one position at any given time.
After a while, it can certainly feel as if those resumes and cover letters seemingly blend together.
Even though your resume might have extensive background experience, extensive professional experience, extensive education experience, and useful skill set - you might still get buried underneath the stack of other resumes.
When you get buried under the stack of resumes that you’re competing against, your chances to land the job collapse. An effective resume will help you stand out amongst those other candidates and ensure that your resume is helping you work towards that dream job you’re pursuing by increasing your chances.
A strong resume is a resume that helps make your job search a little bit easier by increasing your chance to get to the next step of the consideration process: the interview.
In some cases, it only takes roughly 30 seconds for a hospital or healthcare recruiter to review your resume and make a decision on whether or not they want to move forward with you.
This means that you have to seize the moment and impress them with your strong healthcare resume in 30 seconds. You want to make it so that you stand out as a must-consider candidate within those 30 seconds, if not quicker!
Wouldn’t it be great if your resume was so outstanding and strong, that when a healthcare recruiter or hiring manager reviewed it - they knew right away or within five seconds that they had to advance you to the interview stage?
That’s what you’re working towards. An outstanding and strong resume that separates you immediately, and makes you a must-consider within 30 seconds.
Using the tips mentioned in this infographic will help ensure that you stand out amongst those other candidates, and build a strong resume that works for you - instead of against you.
Benefits of A Strong healthcare resume
We’ve already covered some of the great benefits that come with a strong healthcare resume. First it helps to separate you from other candidates that are applying to the same position as you.
Secondly, a strong resume helps establish you as a must-hire or must-consider candidate when they are reviewing the list of applicants and resumes associated with each applicant.
A strong resume will help you convey your expertise in the medical field. Typically, individuals will craft a resume that they then use for every medical or healthcare job that they apply to. The problem with this, is that their resume doesn’t work for them. It effectively works against them due to the broad nature of the resume.
One way of getting around this is to cater a strong resume for each individual position. When you put in an effort to ensure that your resume is strong, you ultimately avoid the pitfalls of crafting a broad and generic resume.
A strong resume can help benefit you in the consideration process if it aligns well with the job you are applying to.
For instance, if the recruiter or hiring manager notices that your resume has similar language to that used in the job posting online, then you will stand out as a candidate who is exactly what they are looking for.
When you craft a broad resume, you can’t create that impression - but a strong resume that is well crafted can!
Another benefit of a strong healthcare resume is that it can help you create an amazing first impression.
As we’ve previously mentioned, the first interaction that a healthcare recruiter or hiring manager has with you is the resume, cover letter, or application that they review about you. This means that you need to separate yourself from those other candidates within the first 30 seconds as we mentioned.
A strong resume can help you create a strong first impression that will ensure your resume isn’t tossed aside and thrown in the trash.
Another great benefit of a strong resume is that it will help showcase your professionalism. There are plenty of healthcare resumes that a hiring manager might come across that have basic mistakes - such as misspellings, grammatical errors, and poor formatting.
It makes the hiring manager question whether or not they put a lot of effort into the resume.
When a hiring manager questions how much effort you put into your resume, something that you are sending to loads of professional individuals for jobs that you wish to obtain, what kind of effort will you place into your daily routine at your professional job?
These are the last questions you want the individual reviewing your resume to think about you. Instead, you want your resume to stand out as an impressive document that speaks to your professionalism and work ethic.
A little bit of review and proofreading will ensure that the only message you convey to potential employers is that you are a dedicated and hard-working individual.
In addition, a strong resume will showcase that you can seamlessly blend in to existing company dynamics and culture.
The ability to blend in to existing company dynamics and culture is critical to whether or not an employer could potentially see you as a positive fit.
If a strong healthcare resume can help you showcase that you can blend in to company culture, then there are limitless benefits that could potentially be gained.
An additional benefit that can be gained from a strong medical resume is that you can demonstrate your ability to communicate effectively.
A resume is a unique tool for you to communicate your experience, background, and belief as to why you should be hired for the open position.
It’s important to remember that you need to be able to communicate the same things on your resume as you would in-person. We all get nervous, but growing comfortable with communicating in a professional setting is a skill that needs to be developed over time.
Everyone gets nervous at various times, and one of the most frequent times is when you are interviewing for a position that you are truly interested in. Those nerves are common, and everyone experiences them - so don’t worry!
A strong medical resume offers you an opportunity to accurately and effectively communicate what you wish the interviewer to know.
When we’re nervous in an interview, you might forget something that you wanted to express, and in worse scenarios - you might even stumble over something you mentioned earlier.
This means that you have an opportunity to communicate clearly without worry about whether or not you will be stressed in the moment or worry about accidentally tripping over your words.
Even though you might experience nerves, you need to be able to communicate close to what your resume says, as we mentioned above.
If you highlight all these talking points, but are unable to expand upon those talking points in your interview - it will make it seem as if you misspoke in your resume, and you’re not actually as qualified as you say you are.
Important Factors to a Medical Resume
There is are a plethora of elements that you could include in your resume, but should you? Some things are absolutely mandatory, while others you should definitely exclude.
These must-have elements will help ensure that you go above crafting an average resume, and instead craft an amazing healthcare resume.
It only takes a little bit of time to make sure that you include these elements, and it will ensure that your resume stand out amongst the other candidates. For more information on how you should craft your resume, check out our Resume Guide.
In the resume guide, we go in depth with some of the specific elements you must include to make the perfect medical resume.
Must-have elements:
- Reverse chronological order
- Industry-relevant keywords
- Absolutely no spelling or grammar errors
- Skills relevant to the position you're applying (that are not listed within your career experiences)
- Bulleted formatting for your previous position's responsibilities
- Contact information at the top and readily available
Quite possibly the most important factor in creating a killer medical resume is to include in your resume are relevant, industry-specific keywords.
You can usually find these in the job listings themselves under the "Responsibilities" or "Duties" section. For example, a Medical Assistant would want to include phrases like "patient care," "administrative duties," and/or "diagnostic testing."
The reason for this is that HR departments use parsing software to screen the resumes initially and sort them into "yes" and "no" piles.
If you want to get past the software, you have to include these keywords, otherwise an actual person may never see your credentials and you've effectively shot yourself in the foot.
When you include relevant keywords or industry-specific keywords that are included in the job requirements or job details section - you can stand out as one of the most qualified candidates.
To avoid getting screened out automatically, you want to ensure that you use relevant keywords from the job posting. In addition, the more relevant keywords you include in your resume, the more those resume review systems will work for you.
Essentially what these resume review systems do is they screen your resume to pull keywords.
From there, the system will then count the number of keywords you have and compare the top keywords to the job posting. From there, the system will then determine whether or not your resume matches what has been deemed as a good fit, and mark you as a relevant candidate or place you in the stack of non-relevant candidates.
For instance, if you have the following skills or experience in your resume:
• Marketed effective treatment methods to patients.
• Improved patient market share for regional hospitals
• Looked for market opportunities to grow treatment options
The resume scanning system might review those three points and pull “market” from each of those, instead of the healthcare related terms you used.
Once the system pulls the term market from your resume, it could formulate an opinion that you are a marketing professional applying for a registered nurse role - and deem your resume non-relevant to the job.
As resume and human resource technologies continue to advance and work towards saving HR professionals time and money - these systems will only grow in their sophistication in weeding out potential applicants.
In other words, using efficient and effective keywords is critical to ensuring that you communicate exactly what you are looking to convey in your resume.
In addition to things that are considered must-have on your strong medical resume, there are also things that you should definitely avoid.
Including these things not only make you look unprofessional, but they can in many cases automatically disqualify you from further consideration. This means that your chances of getting hired for the job that you’re passionate about will all but disappear.
These are just a few things to make sure you avoid including in your resume if you want to ensure that you craft a perfect medical resume.
Definitely DO NOT include:
- Personal hobbies; no one cares if you like knitting or if you play a lot of video games
- An objective similar to "to get a job"
- Past experiences that have nothing to do with the position you're applying for
- Physical characteristics; you may be proud of your fitness regimen, but it's doubtful that squatting 300 lbs is going to be part of your day-to-day
- Religious or political affiliations
Not only is it in poor taste and entirely unprofessional to include these in your resume, but it will also most likely get you tossed into the "no" pile immediately. Unless you're just bored and want to irritate some poor HR rep, I'd leave them out.
Resumes as Marketing Tools
In the labor market, the job seekers are the product and the employers are the consumers, and as such, employers want to find the best possible product to fill their needs.
One thing a lot of people don't understand is that resume is a marketing tool, not just a brief history of your accomplishments, and is used to get past the initial screening process and score the interview.
You should shed the best light on yourself, without lying, to convince the recruiter that you're the best fit for the position.
Keep this in mind while creating your medical resume, along with the following tips from Carrington College:
(Article / Content Updated 2018)