There’s a certain appeal that home health nursing holds for many nurses in the travel sector. Providing personalized care in the comfort of the patient’s home allows you to build stronger relationships with them while experiencing a wide variety of cases and enjoying a more flexible schedule.

Whether you’ve just completed your first year as a staff nurse gaining experience in home health and are ready to give travel nursing a shot, or you’re a seasoned home health nurse exploring travel nursing opportunities, one thing is certain: crafting a top-notch resume can increase your chances of landing your dream position.

Understanding the Importance of a Strong Home Health Travel Nursing Resume

While an up-to-date resume is definitely essential, you need a resume that stands out with distinction if you really want to set yourself apart from other eager applicants. In fact, a strong home health care nurse resume is important because it allows you to seamlessly do the following:

  • Showcase your expertise
  • Demonstrate your commitment to the field
  • Build your credibility as a knowledgeable and experienced home health nurse
  • Open doors for securing more job interviews

So, how can you make your resume stand out?

6 Tips for Tailoring Your Home Health Resume for Travel Nursing Positions

The first step to crafting a memorable home nurse resume is ensuring it contains all the essential sections. While you’re likely familiar with the main components—such as the objective summary, work experience, skills, education, licenses, and certifications—it’s crucial to tailor each section for the specific position you’re applying for. This customization allows you to truly showcase why you’re the best candidate.

If you have a draft of your most recent resume, that’s the perfect place to start. It’ll provide a sturdy backbone upon which to build.

Below, we’re diving into six can’t-miss tips that’ll help you curate the ultimate home health nurse resume for your next travel nursing assignment.

#1 Ensure Your Objective or Summary Statement is Compelling and Relevant

After your contact information, the objective summary is the first section that the hiring manager will see. This is your chance to impress them. And what better way to do so than by including a brief summation of the qualifications, skills, and career aspirations that make you uniquely qualified for this role in particular?

Don’t worry—we’re here to lend a hand. When creating your objective summary, remember these suggestions:

  • Keep it concise—about two descriptive sentences should suffice.
  • Incorporate your most impressive skills related to that job position. If you’re applying to more than one, you can adjust your abilities to match each listing.
  • Include quantifiable achievements, such as your total years of experience, the size of the settings you’re familiar with working in, and the number of patients per day you’ve worked with in a home healthcare setting.

#2 Highlight Relevant Skills and Experience for Home Health Nursing

In your work experience and skills sections, it’s essential to elaborate on the reasons you’re the ideal candidate for the position. Consider the following suggestions when fine-tuning these sections:

  • Embellish on your clinical experience – If your experience is limited to your most recent role, that’s okay. You can still showcase your qualifications by including relevant responsibilities in your current role that relate to the positions you’re applying to, such as administering medications and conducting patient assessments. Additionally, highlight any other nursing-related experience you have, such as your time as a nursing home aide or volunteer experience in healthcare settings.
  • Tailor the information for each job listing – Customize the skills and experience sections of each application by highlighting specific experiences, achievements, and abilities that align with the job requirements and employer’s needs. In addition, showcase your experience in a variety of specialties. For example, if you’ve enjoyed working in pediatrics or hospice posts in the past, highlighting those might increase your odds of working with those types of cases in a home health setting.
  • Include a combination of hard and soft skills – When reviewing the required skills in the job listing, include any skills that align with your current abilities. For instance, if you have experience managing tracheostomy tubes or working with PICC lines, those are excellent hard skills to list on a home health care nurse resume (especially if they’re included in the job listing). Additionally, consider highlighting soft skills such as adaptability and time management, which are also valued in the role.

#3 Showcase Your Education, Certifications, and Licenses

These qualifications not only show that you maintain the necessary regulatory requirements, but they may also show that you’re especially qualified as a home healthcare nurse.

Below, we share our suggestions on what to include when formulating these sections:

  • Education – Include all institutions and degrees, starting from the most recent and moving backward in time. In addition, if your GPA is over 3.2, you can include that, as well as any noteworthy academic accomplishments.
  • Certifications and licenses – You can feature all of your licenses and certifications in one section. Be sure to include the dates you became certified, as well as when each one expires. As a hopeful home health travel nurse, this is also a prime place to highlight your HHNC certification, if you have it.

#4 Utilize Action Verbs and Quantifiable Achievements

On average, hiring managers skim through each resume for approximately seven seconds before moving on. So, when they see generic, overused verbs like “analyzed” and “assisted,” they may not be as moved to continue reading.

However, impactful action verb choices, like advised or spearheaded instead of assisted, are more likely to convey a sense of achievement and responsibility, grabbing the attention of the hiring manager in the process.

For this reason, when you craft each bullet point in the experience section, consider which powerful action verbs will align with your accomplishments to make them more engaging and convincing.

Additionally, hiring managers appreciate quantifiable achievements—they provide concrete data that supports your skills and experience, creating a strong impression of your competence as a home health care or travel nurse (and in the future, hopefully, both).

Here are a few examples of quantifiable accomplishments for travel nurses and home healthcare nurses:

  • Administered medications to 12 patients a day.
  • Implemented fall prevention strategies, leading to a 60% reduction in fall-related injuries in home health patients.

#5 Format Your Resume Just So

Hiring managers review dozens of applications in quick succession. If they’re reviewing them rapidly, it’s helpful to format your resume in a manner that allows for easy readability. A few small but effective formatting suggestions include:

  • Being consistent with font size, font style, and spacing.
  • Opting for 0.5-inch margins.
  • Using 11-point Times New Roman font (there’s a reason it’s a classic).

#6 Proofread and Edit for a Flawless Finish

After working tirelessly to finish your home health nurse resume, you might feel ready to send it out to the masses, giving hiring managers the honor of reading your refreshed and polished version.

While we certainly share your enthusiasm, we recommend taking a pause before sending it out. Come back with a fresh mind to proofread and edit your resume. 

Here are a few tips to consider when reviewing your work:

  • Remove pronouns – It may be tempting to start your sentences with “I” followed by a verb. However, it’s better to skip the personal pronouns and begin your sentences with a strong action verb.
  • Double check for spelling errors – Spellcheck was a novel idea (and extremely useful) in the 90s and early 2000s. Nowadays, there are several more efficient spell checkers you can use for free online compared to just clicking “SpellCheck” within your word doc. As a bonus, many of them will also effectively check your grammar for you, too.
  • Ask a coworker to proofread your resume – After reading your resume from top to bottom a handful of times, you might miss an otherwise easy-to-catch error that a friend could catch on the first read-through. They can also tell you if a sentence doesn’t read clearly or could use reworking.

Find Your Next Home Health Care Nursing Assignment with Host Healthcare

With a carefully curated resume in tow, you’re ready to embark on your next travel nursing adventure in home health care. Before you know it, you’ll be headed to a new and exciting location doing what you love: providing personalized care in the comfort of your patients’ homes—with a little exploring on the side. Ready to get started?

At Host Healthcare, we’ve got your back. Right from the start, you’ll be paired with an experienced recruiter who can help you find an ideal home health travel nurse assignment. Since we have exclusive access to thousands of travel nurse jobs across all states, we’re confident we can find one that meets all of your unique needs. Not to mention, we offer day-1 benefits, dedicated housing assistance and more.

Apply today to become a traveler and experience the Host Healthcare difference for yourself.

 

Sources:

“51 Examples of General Resume Objectives Statements | Indeed.Com.” Indeed, 29 June 2023, www.indeed.com/career-advice/resumes-cover-letters/general-resume-objectives-statements. Accessed: 19 March, 2024.

 “How to Get Your Resume Noticed (and out of the Trash Bin).” Harvard Business Review, 11 Oct. 2021, hbr.org/2020/09/how-to-get-your-resume-noticed-and-out-of-the-trash-bin. Accessed: 19 March, 2024.