Building the perfect travel nurse resume can open up a world of opportunities. However, these inevitably competitive positions can be hard to access if you don’t know how. No matter how much experience you have or how many qualifications you’ve achieved – without a strong resume that leaves an instant impact on recruiters, you’re never going to get the job of your dreams.
Tricks For A Strong Resume
It doesn’t matter how skilled or experienced you are as a travel nurse – if you can’t represent yourself on your resume, you’ll struggle to reach the interview stages where you can shine. Here are our tips and tricks for building the perfect travel nurse resume.
Know Your Skills, Experience, Etc.
Travel nurses need to be able to showcase their skills and experience in the industry. When it comes to having the skills, CareerBuilder suggests that you present the following for travel nursing:
· Flexibility
· Adaptability
· Language Skills
· Critical Thinking
· Emotional Intelligence, AND
· The ability to work in a team
As for experience in the industry, be sure to have at least one year of experience. While some positions and companies may take you within nine months of experience, it’s still important to show that you’ve done more than that in your career thus far.
Also, you’ll need to present any licenses or certifications for travel nursing, so that companies know that you mean well in applying for the job.
· For licenses, you’ll need to include:
o The license type (i.e. Registered Nurse, Medical Assistant, etc.)
o State where license was issued
o Whether it’s a multi-state or compact license
o The license number
o The license’s expiration date
· For certifications, include:
o The name of certification
o The certification’s expiration date
o Certification number (if applicable)
By knowing your skills, experience, and so on ahead of time, it’ll be easier to not only incorporate it into your resume, but also explain those factors to employers in case they ever ask you about them.
Understand The Process
Before you go ahead and start building your travel nurse resume, it’s important to know how companies and recruiters are using your resume. As mentioned above, you’ll need to showcase your skills, experience, etc. in a way that companies will see your worth in the industry. That way, you can tailor your resume to their needs, ensuring that every sentence is directed towards one goal – getting you an interview where you can express yourself.
Nowadays the recruitment process has been broken down and outsourced so much that it’s unlikely your resume will ever be seen by a hiring manager. “Recruiters have placed themselves between you and your dream job – these recruiters will read your resume, deconstruct it and pass it on to organizations that might then approach you for an interview,” says George Jones, a resume writer at OXEssays and BigAssignments. “Tailoring your resume towards the box-checking of the recruiters, and the applicant tracking systems they use, will boost your chances of getting through these stages and into a process where you can really shine.”
Hack The AI
Nowadays recruiters are leveraging technology to make their lives easier. This has meant a surge in the use of applicant tracking systems – AI-powered analyses of resumes which streamline the process before a human eye ever finds your resume.
That means the first hurdle for your resume is to be highly ranked by the AI. Think of your resume as containing the relevant data of your career, and format this to stand out to AI systems. Mirror the language of the job title in your introduction, as the AI will be programmed to pick up on this as a priority, and utilize bullet points and key words throughout your sections.
Get The Formatting Right
Once your resume is passed by the applicant tracking system, it will then be seen by human eyes. Recruiters will typically scan hundreds of travel nurse resumes with the task of narrowing the list down to just a handful for the next stage – that means the recruiter stage is almost as automated as the AI system. So, now isn’t the time to get creative, or else your resume will be discarded.
Keep your formatting simple to enable all the information to be readable at a glance. Do away with fancy headers and footers, stick to one solid font and don’t bother with images, videos or other flourishes. Rather than helping you stand out, this complexity will distract from the valuable information you need to get across.
Customize Your Summary
There’s one place on your resume where you can venture beyond the bullet-point structure and that’s your summary. The summary is where you take the job description and your resume’s enumerated skills and combine them, revealing how you’re the perfect candidate for the job.
“With the job description in your hands you’ll already have some tools for demonstrating that your skills overlap with the advertisement,” says Patricia K. Beeler, a career expert at BoomEssays and Essayroo. “Replicate the language used therein as keywords for your summary.” However, you can go the extra mile by researching the position, and the hospital, through Google reviews and social media. The clues to the values held by the organization will be found here and can be inserted into your summary to prove you’re the perfect candidate.
Conclusion
So, you see, when it comes to applying to be a travel nurse, you’ll have to do everything in your ability to look the part, and be selected as that part. That means writing an amazing resume to not only impress employers, but also actually deliver on the things that you can do.
A travel nurse resume has several audiences – AI tracking systems, recruiters and hiring managers. Tailoring your resume with all three groups in mind will enable you to pass their checks and reach the interview, where you can really shine as a talented individual. You’ve worked your whole life to become employable and experienced, and now those skills can take you to new horizons. Get started on your strong travel nurse resume today.
Bio: Lauren Groff is a resume writer and careers consultant at Essay Writing Services and Academized.com. She relocated to Bangkok in 2017 to pursue a digital nomad dream and now helps others find work around the globe. Also, she is a proofreader at UK Paper Writing Service.