To make sure your healthcare resume reads well, you need to make sure you’re elevating the right sorts of skills and experience, while also highlighting your own unique story within the healthcare industry.
The first thing to know about medical resume writing is that employers want to know both how and why you work in healthcare.
They need to see a genuine desire to help others, and experience operating with empathy and skill.You do this most effectively by leveraging your hard and soft skills.
Your skills and qualifications are a foundation on which you establish the essential soft skills needed to be successful within healthcare. That balance of hard healthcare skills and experienced medical soft skills will stand you apart from your competitors.
The content of your resume has to be both professional and concise. But the tone and style you write in provide the structure and delivery of your resume.
● Overall tone: You want to make sure your resume is professional, clear, and direct. Reduce, as much as possible, pronoun usage but do refer to your own personal achievements in a professional manner.
● Industry terminology: where possible and relevant, make sure you include as much healthcare terminology as possible.This is not only effective in making sure your resume is flagged with applicant tracking systems for relevant key terms (often called “optimizing” your resume for recruitment software), but it also shows your authority and knowledge of your sector to any potential healthcare employer.
● For example: if you are an EEG specialist, make sure you include terms such as “Electroencephalogram”, “brain stimulation”,“waveforms”, “seizure activity”, and so on.
While each resume should rightly be tweaked for whatever specialism a candidate is a specialist in, the resume should still be grounded in clarity.
There is such a thing asa resume that is too full of information. The trick is in making sure critical job-specific information is formatted in a way to draw the eye, and immediately indicate suitability for the job. These unique selling points are then backed up with qualifications, references, and achievements.
Make sure your layout flows in the right way by following this guide:
● Resume Summary including the reason for application
● Education and Training (in chronological order from most recent)
● Clinical experiences, residencies and fellowships
● Certifications and licenses
● Professional background
● References
● Contact Details
You should also make sure your resume follows the XYZ approach -“Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z]." - this means your resume focuses on accomplishments, and how you developed strategies and mechanisms to meet them.
A good resume tells prospective employers what you can do. A genuinely brilliant resume tells them your story.
While there is plenty of advice online about how to keep your resume clear of clutter and organized well(as typified by this piece in INC.about Google’s idea of the perfect resume), in healthcare you want to talk about how your achievements and work have changed, saved, or improved lives.
Quoting Google’sGlobal Head of Recruiting Brendan Castle, “The No. 1 thing you want to bethinking about is to tell your story — not just your work experience, but also what you’ve learned and the accomplishments you’re most proud of”.
A resume needs to highlight the right skills, in the right format. Although this is a baseline rule for most workplaces, within the healthcare industry it is vital that prospective employers can focus on how your soft skills elevate your medical experience, and how your resume tells a career story.
This should provide all the information a recruiter needs to make a qualified call on whether you should be brought to interview!
To find out more about job opportunities, or if you need resume help when applying for EEG roles, simply get in touch with our career coaches.
