How to Polish Your Telemetry Nurse Resume

After years of schooling, late-night study sessions, studying for the NCLEX, and finally becoming a registered nurse, you’re now fully prepared to take on that telemetry nurse position you’ve been striving for. With all that hard work under your belt, they should hand you the job without question, right? Well, not exactly.

Despite being new to the nursing profession with little to no work experience, putting together a telemetry nurse resume is a must. And for those who have a bachelor’s degree in nursing along with work experience, you can gain leverage over other candidates by updating your resume and giving it that proper shine. Resume writing can be tricky, so for tips and tricks to being noticed by hiring managers, read ahead.

What Hiring Managers are Looking For

There are two aspects you need to understand about resumes: applicant tracking systems (ATS) and the resume’s purpose.

Applicant Tracking System

ATS is a software designed to make a hiring manager’s life efficient and bearable. For one or two open positions, a hiring manager might receive hundreds of applicants to sort through. To weed out candidates, they use an applicant tracking system. This scans through resumes searching for keywords and rank orders them based on how much they match the manager’s inputs. 

While this may sound like a shady tactic used by hiring managers, nurses can use this knowledge to game the system. Always take care to refer to the job posting when phrasing specific qualifications. If in the posting they refer to a required skill as “EKG interpretation,” use that exact phrasing. Don’t put “interpreted EKG” or “interpreting EKG.” If you do, be sure to include the phrase elsewhere in your resume to cover both angles.

Purpose of the Resume

Remember that as you create your resume, the purpose is not to land the job. The resume objective is to get an interview. These are two different objectives, and the latter is more important. What a resume intends to do is provide the relevant qualifications, experience, and achievements to demand an interview. Once you’re at the interview, your personality will win you the job.

What to Include in the Resume?

Now that you understand the basics behind building the resume, it’s important to know what to include and exclude. Here are all the sections you should provide information about in your telemetry nurse resume.

Introduction

Both the introduction and education section should be kept as short as possible, adding only the necessary information. You should include your name, contact information, and email in the intro. 

Professional Summary

The professional summary, while near the beginning, should be written last. It is a summarized version of all your qualifications, experience, and achievements wrapped up into a concise paragraph. Try your best to keep it between 4-5 lines, and layer it with active sentence structure. 

Qualifications

In the core qualifications section, include a healthy balance of technical skills and patient bedside skills. Be sure to cater them to the specific job. Some telemetry jobs are remote and have little to no patient interaction or direct patient care.

When in doubt, always refer back to the job posting for keywords. Technical skills should outweigh emotional skills. However, both are important.

Work Experience

Here, you’ll want to mention your most recent employment. Make sure it’s healthcare-related and use the bullet points to talk about job specifics and patient care experience. How many beds were in the hospital and how many of those were in your unit? What were your primary duties?

If you don’t have any healthcare-related work experience but have had a job in the past, it’s acceptable to list this. However, don’t take up too much space. Allow it to be a conversational topic if the hiring manager chooses to ask why you switched fields.

Achievements

If you have any outstanding achievements or awards of recognition, now is the time to boast. Try to limit this to the top two achievements you’ve received. If you don’t have any achievements but have provided community service, mention this instead.

Education

You’ll want to include all certifications in this section of the resume. There are many certifications available to telemetry nurses; use your best judgment when deciding which ones to include. Remember not to overcrowd this section and allow the white space to let your other sections hold more weight.

Putting It All Together

When putting all the pieces together, try to follow the font and length suggestions of a typical professional resume. While standing out is important, the format of your resume is not where you should be taking creative liberties.

Nurse resumes should be written in 10-12pt font in Times New Roman or Arial. And the length of the entire resume should be about 1-1½ pages. Also, be sure that your resume is error-free. A resume is your first impression, and you don’t want the first thing the hiring manager reads to be a spelling or grammatical error.

If you are ever unsure about your resume, look over professional resume examples and make a comparison. Once it’s all together, you’re ready to submit your resume and score an interview. Good luck!

Sources:

Glassdoor. Can Your Resume Beat The Bots? How to Make It ATS-friendly. https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/ats-friendly-resume/

Consult QD. Centralized Cardiac Telemetry Monitoring Slashes Alarm Fatigue, Saves Lives.  https://consultqd.clevelandclinic.org/centralized-cardiac-telemetry-monitoring-slashes-alarm-fatigue-saves-lives/

Simply Hired. Resume Tips: Avoid the Passive Voice.  https://blog.simplyhired.com/jobsearch/resumes/resume-tips-avoid-the-passive-voice/