In our recent Nursing Executive Report, we uncovered a startling truth: 90% of healthcare executives predict that the nursing shortage will worsen in the coming years. Coupled with rising turnover and burnout among nurses, this leaves recruiters struggling to fill positions quickly. While this trend is undoubtedly concerning, it also presents a unique opportunity for nurses seeking a change to stand out in a sea of qualified candidates.
The most important tool in your job search toolbox? A stellar resume. It leaves an all-important first impression on busy recruiters and conveys not only your qualifications, but your ability to communicate clearly and effectively.
Recruiters aren’t the only ones overloaded at work. Nurses are reporting record levels of burnout—in fact, the same study found that 46% of nurses cite burnout as their primary reason for leaving a job. How do you find time to craft the perfect resume?
Enter Incredible Health. We’re on a mission to modernize the healthcare hiring process by partnering with top hospitals to help nurses find permanent jobs and recruiters find qualified nurses, all on one easy-to-use platform. Leveraging our network of recruiters, we asked for their top tips to help your nursing resume land you a new job in 2025.
Tip 1: Keep it Simple and Organized
Recruiter Insight: The most common mistakes recruiters see in nursing resumes are surprisingly simple: missing certifications, improper formatting or ordering of job dates, or using too many pages.
You’ve probably heard the common trope that recruiters spend only six to seven seconds reading a resume. Don’t waste those precious seconds making them dig through a disorganized or overly complicated document. Instead, opt for a resume template that is clean, concise, and makes the most important information easiest to find.
Incredible Health’s recruiter-approved resume template has helped thousands of nurses secure permanent jobs by focusing on these key factors:
- Name and contact information: Ensure your contact details are easy to find, and only include relevant information. Your full address is not necessary.
- Licenses, certifications, and specialties: Include all your qualifications in a prominent, easy-to-read section.
- Chronological job history: List your job history in order from most to least recent, and include both the month and year you started and ended each job.
- Simple, easy-to-read formatting: Utilize a clean and professional format to ensure readability. Use color sparingly and save space by skipping a photo.
Not sure where to start? Our AI-powered Resume Wizard will guide you through the process for free, or you can explore our other templates here.
Tip 2: Tailor Your Work Experience
Recruiter Insight: Recruiters agree that the work experience section is the most essential part of your resume. Nursing resumes that stand out are those that customize their work experience to reflect both the positions they’ve held and the one they’re applying for.
Finding the right level of detail can be tricky: You want to balance the length of your resume (no more than two pages) with specific information on the specialties, skills, and successes you’ve had. Our recruiters identified these elements as the most important to include in your experience section:
- Use concise bullets: Instead of long paragraphs, use a few concise bullets to make your resume easier to read.
- Specify your specialty or unit: Indicate the type of employment (full-time, part-time, travel, etc.) and the unit you worked in (emergency, surgery, NICU, etc.) for each role. If you have experience as a travel nurse, specify the agency you worked with.
- Include hospital details: Provide information about the hospital you worked in, such as bed size, equipment used, trauma level, and magnet status.
- Highlight relevant skills: Focus on the skills from each job that are most directly applicable to the position you’re applying for.
By honing in on specific keywords and skills that recruiters are searching for, you can communicate the right information in the crucial first few seconds that a recruiter spends with your resume.
Better yet, Resume Wizard takes the guesswork out of it by generating relevant work descriptions that impress recruiters, which you can further customize with helpful tips along the way.
Tip 3: Skip the cover letter
Recruiter Insight: While cover letters have traditionally been seen as a crucial piece of a complete job application, the recruiters we surveyed agreed that they rarely have time to actually read them.
The nursing landscape is evolving, and what was once the norm isn’t always the best approach for today’s nurses and recruiters. Today, the time spent crafting the “perfect” cover letter can slow down the hiring process more than it helps. Incredible Health simplifies the process: We don’t require you to submit a cover letter. Instead, our recruiter-approved resume template and free app ensure that the right information is front and center for recruiters to see.
If you’ve followed the tips above, that means you’re ready now to start applying to jobs at more than 1,500 top hospitals on Incredible Health—the same hospitals whose recruiters contributed their tips to this post. Happy hunting!
