Staff nurse resume examples for 2025

Your resume summary sums up your experience and skills, making it easy for hiring managers to understand your qualifications at a glance. Here are some tips to writing the most important 2-4 sentences of your resume:

Step 1: Mention your current job title or the role you're pursuing.

Step 2: Include your years of experience in staff nurse-related roles. Consider adding relevant company and industry experience as relevant to the job listing.

Step 3: Highlight your greatest accomplishments. Here is your chance to make sure your biggest wins aren't buried in your resume.

Step 4: Again, keep it short. Your goal is to summarize your experience and highlight your accomplishments, not write a paragraph.

These four steps should give you a strong elevator pitch and land you some staff nurse interviews.

Use your Skills section to show you have the knowledge and technical ability to do the job. Here is how to make the most of your skills section and make sure you have the right keywords:

1. Look at the job listing and skills listed. You need to include the exact keywords from the job description to get your resume in front of an actual human. Do you have those skills? Fantastic! Be sure to list them.
2. Include as many relevant hard or technical staff nurse skills as possible for each job you apply to.
3. Be specific with the skills you have and be sure you are using the most up to date and accurate terms.

These five steps should give you a strong elevator pitch and land you some staff nurse interviews.

Next you should include your work experience. Structure your work experience section by listing your most recent experience first, followed by earlier roles in reverse chronological order.

Start with your job title, company name, city, and state on the left. Align dates in month and year format on the right-hand side.

Include only recent, relevant jobs. Avoid including work experience over 20 years to avoid ageism.

Beneath each job, you should have bullet points to emphasize why you're the perfect fit for the staff nurse.

Remember, your resume is not a list of responsibilities or a job description. This is your chance to show why you're good at your job and what you accomplished.

Use the XYZ formula for your work experience bullet points. Here's how it works:

• Use strong action verbs like Led, Built, or Optimized.
• Follow up with numbers when possible to support your results. How much did performance improve? How much revenue did you drive?
• Wrap it up by explaining the actions you took to achieve the result and how you made an impact.

This creates bullet points that read Achieved X, measured by Y, by doing Z.

Here are examples from great staff nurse resumes:

The education section should display your highest degree first.

Place your education section appropriately on your resume. If you graduated over 5 years ago, this section should be at the bottom of your resume. If you just graduated and lack relevant work experience, the education section should go to the top.

If you have a bachelor's or master's degree, do not list your high school education. If your graduation year is more than 15-20 years ago, it's better not to include dates in this section.

Here are some examples of good education entries for resumes:

Certifications are a great way to showcase special expertise or niche skills. Some jobs even require certifications to be hired.

To list, use the full name of the certification and the organization that issued it, along with the date of achievement.

If you have any of these certifications, be sure to include them on your staff nurse resume:

1. Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA)
2. Trauma Nursing Core Course (TNCC)
3. Basic Life Support (BLS)
4. Family Nurse Practitioner
5. Certified in Executive Nursing Practice (CENP)
6. Certified Nurse Technician (CNT)
7. Legal Nurse Consultant Certified (LNCC)
8. Adult, Pediatric and Neonatal Critical Care Nurses (CCRN)
9. Oncology Certified Nurse (OCN)
10. Certified Nurse Educator (CNE)