5 Quick Tips to Improve Your ER Travel Nursing Resume

Keep it brief and beautiful

Your goal is to get recruiters’ and hiring managers’ attention. When your resume is in a pile with hundreds of others, you aren’t going to have much time to make a first impression. In fact, some studies say most people in hiring only spend six seconds reading your resume!

You want to pack as much into those six seconds as possible:

• Keep your sentences and bullet points short and to the point.
• Make your resume visually appealing. No one wants to read big blocks of text.
• Include a lot of white space so it’s easily skimmable.
• Use headers and bullet points to break up text and highlight what’s most important.

Keep it relevant

With just seconds to get a glimpse of who you are, a nursing manager wants to see a picture of a dedicated, proficient ER travel nurse. If you include a lot of details specific to another specialty or from a non-nursing position, the picture will be confusing. Your resume will get put in the slush pile.

“But! I worked in L&D for five years! I can’t leave it off my resume,” you might object. No need to cut relevant experience. Just reframe your experience in other specialties so that it reflects the skills and knowledge that make you a strong ER travel nurse, such as:

• Over 4 years of ER experience
• Experience at a Level 1 teaching facility
• Completed 5 travel contracts
• Prioritizes the most urgent patients first
• Excels at time management

Keep it evidence-based

You live by evidence-based practice. Your protocols for new ER patients, your technique for administering meds, and your bedside manner are all informed by a body of knowledge backed by evidence.

Apply the same rigorousness to your resume. Simply stating that you’re efficient is much less compelling than providing proof. Evidence-based resumes rely on statistics, awards, professional feedback, and other more objective statements to bolster your claims.

Example

Evidence-less

• Excel at enhancing patient satisfaction.
• Dedicated to patient safety.

Evidence-based

• Excel at enhancing customer service and improving patient satisfaction; awarded three patient satisfaction awards.
• Spearheaded an initiative as a member of Mercy West’s Safety Committee that reduced patient falls by 65% over an 18-month period.

Choose your words wisely

“Resumes must be mistake-free,” says Beth Hawkes, MSN, RN-BC, former nurse manager and author of Your Last Nursing Class: How to Land Your First Nursing Job, When resumes contain careless errors, it can be viewed as a predictor of carelessness on the job.”

Here are some common errors to avoid in your resume writing:

• Misspelling the facility or hospital you’re applying to
• Including date errors, such as writing 2027 instead of 2017 or including the wrong date altogether
• Confusing commonly transposed words, such as “there” and “their” or “your” and “you’re”
• Using overused words. Hawkes says, “Everyone is motivated and detail oriented, and by the time the recruiter has read “motivated and detail-oriented” twenty times in one morning, it is simply annoying white noise.”

Looking for more on making your resume error-free? Check out our article on common travel nurse resume mistakes and how to avoid them.

Get a second opinion

It can be tricky to have an objective perspective on your own resume. And, after looking at it draft after draft, you might become numb to confusing language, skip over errors, and otherwise have trouble being your own best editor.

Hand your resume over to a trusted friend, an experience ER colleague, or a professional resume editor. Be sure it’s someone who will give you an honest opinion and help you present the best picture of your skillset and knowledge.

It’s also great practice to read your resume out loud to yourself. You may catch phrasing that sounds ingenuine, errors in logic, or other missteps that you might miss otherwise.

So there you have it, five quick tips to make your ER travel nursing resume really pop.

Looking for more resume advice? Check out our resource guide How to Write the Perfect Travel Nurse Resume to Get the Job You Want [with Downloadable Resume Templates].