As an agency nurse, you may struggle with effectively showcasing your diverse range of experiences in different healthcare settings on your resume. Our guide provides tailored strategies to help you consolidate your varied skill sets, ensuring your resume stands out to potential employers.
- Defining the highlights of your agency nurse career through your resume summary, objective, and experience.
- Real-world agency nurse resume samples with best practices on how to stand out amongst the endless pile of candidate resumes.
- Most in-demand agency nurse resume skills and certifications across the industry.
- Standardizing your resume layout, while maintaining your creativity and individuality.
If the agency nurse resume isn't the right one for you, take a look at other related guides we have:
The ultimate formula for your agency nurse resume format
Our best advice on how to style your agency nurse resume is this - first, take the time to study the job advert requirements.
The resume format you select should ultimately help you better align how your experience matches the specific role.
There are four crucial elements you need to thus take into consideration:
- How you present your experience. If you happen to have plenty of relevant expertise, select the reverse-chronological resume format to organize your experience by dates, starting with the latest.
- Don't go over the top with writing your resume. Instead, stick with a maximum of two-page format to feature what matters most about your profile.
- Headers aren't just for "decoration". The header of your resume helps recruiters allocate your contact details, portfolio, and so much more.
- The PDF format rules. It's the most common practice to submit your agency nurse resume as a PDF so that your resume doesn't lose its layout. However, make sure the read the job well - in some instances, they might require a doc file.
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Always remember that your agency nurse certifications can be quantified across different resume sections, like your experience, summary, or objective. For example, you could include concise details within the expertise bullets of how the specific certificate has improved your on-the-job performance.
Essential sections that should make up your agency nurse resume include:
- The header - with your contact details (e.g. email and telephone number), link to your portfolio, and headline
- The summary (or objective) - to spotlight the peaks of your professional career, so far
- The experience section - with up to six bullets per role to detail specific outcomes
- The skills list - to provide a healthy mix between your personal and professional talents
- The education and certification - showing your most relevant degrees and certificates to the agency nurse role
What recruiters want to see on your resume:
- Adaptability and Flexibility: Demonstrating the ability to adjust to various clinical settings and patient needs quickly.
- Clinical Experience: Highlighting specific nursing skills and experience in multiple specialties or healthcare settings.
- Strong Interpersonal Skills: Showcasing communication abilities and the capacity to work effectively with different teams and patients.
- Up-to-Date Credentials: Ensuring that nursing licenses, certifications, and mandatory health checks are current and in compliance with regional healthcare regulations.
- Reliability and Punctuality: Evidence of a history of consistent attendance and the ability to manage a variable schedule.
Five dos for building your agency nurse resume experience section
The best strategic approach to your agency nurse resume experience section is to support your particular responsibilities with actions and achievements.
For example, you could list:
- Up to six responsibilities in your day-to-day work, supported by why they're important for your role, department, or organization;
- Experience items that have helped you sustain and enhance your technical knowledge within the field, or, perhaps, have helped you grow as a professional;
- Any metrics that pinpoint your success within your past roles;
- How you've solved specific problems in your day-to-day work;
- Strategies and solutions you've implemented for growth - and how that growth was measured.
The agency nurse resume experience is your best shot at making a good first impression on recruiters. That's why we've included some real-world professional examples to get you thinking about how you present your experience:
- Managed a team of agency nurses, ensuring high-quality care across various units including ICU, ER, and general wards in a 300-bed hospital.
- Implemented an innovative scheduling system that reduced understaffing incidents by 40%, improving patient care and staff morale.
- Developed and conducted ongoing training workshops on the latest nursing practices, increasing the skillset of agency nurses by 25% and ensuring up-to-date patient care protocols.
- Delivered compassionate care to up to 20 patients daily in a fast-paced surgical unit, leading to a 15% increase in positive patient outcome ratings.
- Collaborated with a multidisciplinary team to create a post-operative care plan that reduced patient recovery time by an average of two days.
- Championed a patient education initiative that enhanced patient self-care post-discharge, resulting in a 10% decrease in readmission rates.
- Provided critical nursing services in four high-demand urban hospitals, often filling in with less than 24-hour notice, exemplifying adaptability and expertise under pressure.
- Instrumental in implementing electronic health record best practices amongst temporary staff, improving data accuracy by 30%.
- Mentored new agency nurses, fostering a supportive work environment and enhancing team efficiency and patient care standards.
- Executed nursing duties in emergency departments, typically serving 50+ patients per shift, and received a commendation for exemplary crisis management skills.
- Reduced medication errors by 20% through diligent administration and tracking, whilst handling complex cases in a pediatric care unit.
- Engaged in community outreach programs by providing free health check-ups and education, serving approximately 200 individuals monthly.
- Efficiently managed nursing responsibilities for long-term care patients, raising patient satisfaction by consistently delivering personalized and attentive service.
- Spearheaded a task force to create a protocol for pressure ulcer prevention, decreasing incidence by 25% among bedridden patients.
- Assisted in coordinating a successful state health inspection, which concluded with zero deficiencies and accolades for the nursing team.
- Orchestrated the implementation of new cardiology treatment guidelines that resulted in a 10% improvement in patient outcomes for cardiac arrest scenarios.
- Played a pivotal role in a hospital-wide infection control initiative that dropped infection rates by 18% within a year.
- Demonstrated exceptional flexibility by covering shifts in multiple departments, allowing seamless patient care during workforce shortfalls.
- Administered chemotherapy to oncology patients, maintaining a 98% accuracy rate in treatment plans and medication dosing.
- Acted as a liaison between patients, families, and the oncology department, increasing communication efficiency by 35%, leading to better patient understanding of treatment processes.
- Introduced a volunteer-based companionship program for end-of-life patients which was adopted hospital-wide after a successful 6-month pilot.
- Cared for a diverse patient population in rural clinics, often with limited resources, achieving a 90% patient satisfaction rating.
- Developed and led a health promotion campaign that increased community engagement with preventive services by 50%, significantly improving public health outcomes.
- Optimized vaccine administration during flu season, reaching a record 500 vaccinations within a month and reducing the spread of influenza.
Quantifying impact on your resume
- Include the number of facilities you've worked in to demonstrate the breadth of your experience and adaptability.
- List the types of units or departments you've been assigned to, quantifying the diversity of your clinical skills.
- Specify the number of patient beds you've managed per shift to indicate your capability to handle various levels of workload.
- Mention the percentage of shifts you’ve picked up as extra to highlight your willingness to contribute to team efforts.
- Quantify any improvements or contributions you've made to patient care or facility protocols.
- Document the number of successful patient outcomes or cases you've been involved with to showcase your effectiveness.
- State the number of years of experience you have in specific healthcare specialties to establish your expert knowledge.
- Report any certifications or continuing education courses completed with the dates and durations to show commitment to professional growth.
Action verbs for your agency nurse resume
Experience section for candidates with zero-to-none experience
While you may have less professional experience in the field, that doesn't mean you should leave this section of your resume empty or blank.
Consider these four strategies on how to substitute the lack of experience with:
- Volunteer roles - as part of the community, you've probably gained valuable people (and sometimes even technological capabilities) that could answer the job requirements
- Research projects - while in your university days, you may have been part of some cutting-edge project to benefit the field. Curate this within your experience section as a substitute for real-world experience
- Internships - while you may consider that that summer internship in New York was solely mandatory to your degree, make sure to include it as part of your experience, if it's relevant to the role
- Irrelevant previous jobs - instead of detailing the technologies you've learned, think about the transferable skills you've gained.
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Highlight any significant extracurricular activities that demonstrate valuable skills or leadership.
Bringing your agency nurse hard skills and soft skills to the forefront of recruiters' attention
Hard skills are used to define the technological (and software) capacities you have in the industry. Technical skills are easily defined via your certification and expertise.
Soft skills have more to do with your at-work personality and how you prosper within new environments. People skills can be obtained thanks to your whole life experience and are thus a bit more difficult to define.
Why do recruiters care about both types of skills?
Hard skills have more to do with job alignment and the time your new potential employers would have to invest in training you.
Soft skills hint at how well you'd adapt to your new environment, company culture, and task organization.
Fine-tune your resume to reflect on your skills capacities and talents:
- Avoid listing basic requirements (e.g. "Excel"), instead substitute with the specifics of the technology (e.g. "Excel Macros").
- Feature your workplace values and ethics as soft skills to hint at what matters most to you in a new environment.
- Build a separate skills section for your language capabilities, only if it makes sense to the role you're applying for.
- The best way to balance agency nurse hard and soft skills is by building a strengths or achievements section, where you define your outcomes via both types of skills.
There are plenty of skills that could make the cut on your resume.
That's why we've compiled for you some of the most wanted skills by recruiters, so make sure to include the technologies and soft skills that make the most sense to you (and the company you're applying for):
Top skills for your agency nurse resume:
Clinical expertise
Patient care
Medication administration
Life support
Nursing assessment
Charting and documentation
Wound care
Infection control
Medical equipment operation
Patient education
Communication
Adaptability
Problem-solving
Stress management
Empathy
Teamwork
Time management
Attention to detail
Interpersonal skills
Professionalism
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Always remember that your agency nurse certifications can be quantified across different resume sections, like your experience, summary, or objective. For example, you could include concise details within the expertise bullets of how the specific certificate has improved your on-the-job performance.
Maximizing your agency nurse resume: education and certification sections
To effectively showcase your industry knowledge in your agency nurse resume, it's important to properly list your education and certifications.
For the education section, ensure you include:
- Higher education degrees pertinent to the industry or those at a postgraduate level;
- The start and end dates of your education, along with the name of the institution you graduated from;
- Your GPA and relevant coursework, but only if they are impressive and applicable to the role.
Additionally, create a separate certifications section to spotlight your most notable recognitions. Another excellent place to feature a leading industry certificate is in your resume header, right after your name.
Below is a list of key industry certifications that are often sought after by recruiters
The top 5 certifications for your agency nurse resume:
- Basic Life Support (BLS) - American Heart Association (AHA)
- Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support (ACLS) - American Heart Association (AHA)
- Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) - American Heart Association (AHA)
- Registered Nurse (RN) - National Council of State Boards of Nursing (NCSBN)
- Certified Nurse Agency (CNA) - State Nursing Board or Department of Health
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List your educational qualifications and certifications in reverse chronological order.
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Adding a summary or objective to your agency nurse resume
One of the most crucial elements of your professional presentation is your resume's top one-third. This most often includes:
- Either a resume summary - your career highlights at a glance. Select the summary if you have plenty of relevant experience (and achievements), you'd like recruiters to remember about your application.
- Or, a resume objective - to showcase your determination for growth. The perfect choice for candidates with less experience, who are looking to grow their career in the field.
If you want to go above and beyond with your agency nurse resume summary or resume objective, make sure to answer precisely why recruiters need to hire you. What is the additional value you'd provide to the company or organization? Now here are examples from real-life agency nurse professionals, whose resumes have helped them land their dream jobs:
Resume summaries for a agency nurse job
- With over a decade of dedicated nursing across various intensive care units, I bring a wealth of critical care expertise and a deep commitment to patient wellness. Having led rapid response teams and played a pivotal role in decreasing ICU readmissions by 15%, my goal is to further the standards of patient care excellence.
- Eager to leverage my 8 years of experience in pediatric nursing, including advanced certifications in pediatric life support, I have effectively managed caseloads of 30+ patients per shift while contributing to a 20% improvement in patient satisfaction scores at a leading children’s hospital.
- Seasoned professional in emergency response, transitioning to nursing with freshly obtained RN licensure and glowing preceptor evaluations. Proven track record in high-stress situations, looking to apply a strong foundation in patient assessment and triage acquired from years as a paramedic.
- As a former health educator with a freshly minted BSN, my journey has been driven by a passion for community well-being. Fusing my strong communication skills and expertise in public health, I am prepared to excel in providing compassionate nursing care while advocating for patient education and preventative strategies.
- Enthusiastic about starting a career in nursing, bringing a fresh perspective, unyielding energy, and a voracious appetite for learning. Aiming to utilize my recent nursing degree and internship experiences at top healthcare facilities to deliver high-quality care and quickly adapt to the dynamic nursing environment.
- Recently graduated nurse aiming to translate my top 10% academic standing and extensive volunteer experience into high-quality clinical practice. Eager to apply my comprehensive training and compassionate nature to support patient care objectives and contribute to a culture of holistic health support.
Extra sections to include in your agency nurse resume
What should you do if you happen to have some space left on your resume, and want to highlight other aspects of your profile that you deem are relevant to the role? Add to your agency nurse resume some of these personal and professional sections:
- Passions/Interests - to detail how you spend both your personal and professional time, invested in various hobbies;
- Awards - to present those niche accolades that make your experience unique;
- Publications - an excellent choice for professionals, who have just graduated from university or are used to a more academic setting;
- Volunteering - your footprint within your local (or national/international) community.
Key takeaways
- Impactful agency nurse resumes have an easy-to-read format that tells your career narrative with highlights;
- Select a resume summary or objective, depending on what sort of impression you'd like to leave and if your accomplishments are relevant to the job;
- If you don't happen to have much industry expertise, curate additional gigs you've had, like contracts and internships, to answer how your experience aligns with the agency nurse job;
- Be specific about the hard and soft skills you list on your resume to define your niche expertise and outcomes of using those particular skills;
- Always tailor your resume for each agency nurse application to ensure you meet all job requirements.
