To ensure your healthcare resume reads well, you need to elevate the right skills and experience while also highlighting your unique story within the healthcare industry.
Soft Skills vs Hard Skills
The first thing to know about medical resume writing is employers want to know 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 for establishing the essential soft skills needed to succeed in healthcare. That balance of hard healthcare and experienced medical soft skills will distinguish you from your competitors.
Here are our top tips for ensuring your healthcare resume opens the right doors!
The importance of language
Your resume’s content must be professional and concise. However, the tone and style you use will provide the structure and delivery of your resume.
● Overall tone: Ensure your resume is professional, clear, and direct. Reduce pronoun usage as much as possible, but do refer to your achievements professionally.
● Industry terminology: where possible and relevant, ensure you include as much healthcare terminology as feasible. This effectively ensures your resume is flagged with applicant tracking systems for appropriate key terms (often called “optimizing” your resume for recruitment software). Still, 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.
Make sure your layout is concise
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 as a resume that is too full of information. The trick is to make sure critical job-specific information is formatted to draw the eye and immediately indicate suitability for the job. Qualifications, references, and achievements back up these unique selling points.
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 your accomplishments and how you developed strategies and mechanisms to meet them.
Let the order tell a story
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’s Global Head of Recruiting, Brendan Castle, “The No. 1 thing you want to be thinking 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”.
Summary
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 about whether you should be brought to the interview!
To find out more about job opportunities or if you need help with your resume when applying for EEG roles, contact our career coaches.
