Professional Development

Homework

0:00:04.3 Speaker 1: Hello. Hello. So we are going to get started in a few minutes, we’re gonna let folks just kind of warm up and join us and we are excited tonight, to bring you. So before I do any of that wonderful, good talk about our special guest, I will just give folks a few seconds in order to kind of log in and jump on to the stream. Hopefully, everyone has been doing well, and like our guest, you are not snowed in, or if you are, you are still doing okay and kind of just making it. Fantastic, since we have folks who are joining. And as always, this will be recorded, so if you miss it, you can always watch it in your portal. So I am very excited for our special guest tonight. She has graciously agreed to grace us with her presence. So we have Amanda. You guys probably know her as Amanda Rx, she’s an Ivy League educated nurse practitioner and a career mentor who helps nursing professionals find and land their dream jobs. She founded the Résumé Rx in 2018, and has since grown the company to over 40,000 nursing students and professionals, worldwide.

0:01:24.4 Speaker 1: The Résumé Rx was born out of the desire to see a world, where medical professionals feel balanced, empowered and personally and professionally fulfilled. Amanda has been featured in Scrubs Magazine, nurse.org, kevinmd.com, and Nurse Grid. She is also the host of the Nurse Becoming Podcast, which is a great podcast, if you guys are not listening to it. So we are super excited to have her, and she is going to talk a little bit about resumes for us. That is our next theme or that is our next part of our theme, in the theme of jobs and how to go about this step-by-step. So let’s go ahead and bring Amanda on screen. So there’s Amanda. Hello.

0:02:11.3 Amanda Guarniere: Hello. Hello everyone, thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure to present to you tonight. This will actually be a two-part presentation. So tonight, I’m going to give a bit of a lecture about resumes and cover letters and kind of how you put everything on paper, and then we’ll have an upcoming chat at the end of next week, where we’ll do a question and answers. Very excited to be here.

0:02:37.2 S1: Absolutely. We’re so excited you’re here. Like we’ve said, I’ve been on Amanda’s podcast as of recently, so you guys be on the lookout for that. But we have been what we say internet friends for a little bit, so we are kind of nurturing that relationship right now, so that’s been very nice as well. But you guys were excited. I know that you guys were looking forward to the resume portion of this. So we’re just gonna go ahead and get started. You know how I am protective of everyone’s time, so I’m gonna fade to the back and I’m gonna let Amanda to do her thing.

0:03:12.2 AG: Alright. Okay. Great. Everyone should be able to see my screen. And we’re gonna dive right in. So the theme for tonight’s talk is, how to put your passions on paper with a powerful resume and cover letter. And I’m definitely gonna give you some actionable tips in terms of how you can prepare your documents, but the one thing… The one theme that you may or may not be surprised to hear is that, I’m going to tell you a couple of times that it’s not all about your resume. So I work with a lot of nurses and NPs who kind of put all their eggs in their resume basket. And so while I’m definitely here to give you tips about that, I want to also preface and say that that’s not the only thing to be focused on and I’m sure that that’s probably not news to you. You will hear that throughout this experience that you’re having and throughout my talk in the Q and A as well. And feel free to chat. If there are questions that I see come in as we go and it kind of fits into where I’m at, I’m more than happy to answer questions, and just remember that we will have a dedicated follow-up session, to really dive in to some specific questions too. But certainly, if there’s anything that needs clarification, I want you to let me know.

0:04:37.1 AG: So I wanna start with a little bit of a visual. So what I want you to do is, imagine a funnel with a bunch of job applicants, candidates being dumped in the top of the funnel, and the person who comes out the bottom is the one who gets the job. I know this is a little bit abstract, so I do have a graphic for you, to bring your imagination to life. So this is your job search funnel. So I want you to pick a blue person at the top and pretend that is you, and there are lots of activities that go into the steps of this process. So this is the main idea, that your resume is just part of this process for job-seeking, so you definitely want to take it in the context of these other things. So if we were to go in step-wise order, first, you have the outreach of trying to find a job, whether it’s applying for jobs that are posted, leveraging your network, reaching out to places who may or may not need you as an employee. Then you need your resume to kind of showcase your experience on paper, give that digital handshake, so to speak, and then you have the interview and the vetting, both of you and of the job opportunity, which hopefully then leads to an offer, which leads to someone getting hired.

0:06:03.3 AG: The point being with this demonstration that obviously, a lot of people go in the top of the funnel, and for most jobs, only one person comes out the bottom. So tonight, we’re gonna talk about that resume piece, which is that second layer. But of course, the reason why I show you this whole visual is, to make sure that you understand that there’s so much happening before and after this phase, and the point of the resume isn’t to get you the job, it’s really, to get you the interview, so that you then can sit down face-to-face or virtually, to really meet that person and have them see your qualifications and your personality come to life.

0:06:43.5 AG: So while your resume is very important, I don’t ever wanna give the idea that it’s solely or fully responsible for your successful employment. So hopefully, that makes sense and we can all agree upon that together. Just to give a little bit of a background about who I am, if we haven’t met before. My name is Amanda Guarniere. I am a nurse practitioner and I have been, since about 2011, and I’m kind of an NP-turned entrepreneur. I’ve been on a clinical sabbatical for the past year, and a couple of years ago, I started my business, The Résumé Rx, which is really my opportunity to provide career mentorship to nursing professionals. I’m also a mom of three little girls, and a former classical violinist. So I am a second degree nurse and nurse practitioner. I love true crime documentaries. I always wish that I’m on vacation, especially with the three feet of snow that’s outside my door right now.

0:07:46.6 AG: So really, I consider myself a mentor to NPs, I feel strongly that we all need to support one another. I’m definitely on the support side of things, as opposed to being kind of on the nurses eat their young, side of the equation. So all that to say, no question is ever considered stupid. I don’t think that… Yeah, I get really fed up with what I can see online, in terms of unsupportive nurse practitioners supporting or teaching, educating, speaking to the newer generation of NPs. So I always like to make sure you know that about me up front.

0:08:29.4 AG: So, way back in 2011, when I graduated from NP school, I realised by the end of my program, that I felt pretty confident in my clinical preparation and how to prepare for and pass my board exam. But I had no idea how to find a job. I took a review course, this was pre-Latrina Walden Exam Solutions, so I didn’t have the pleasure of going through that. But I passed my boards, I felt that that part was pretty predictable, like graduate, study, take a review course, take your exam and hopefully pass. It was very much, “Do this and then this.” But my job search felt totally backwards, it was like I was assembling a piece of IKEA furniture without any instructions, and depending on where you are in your career, you might totally know what I’m talking about.

0:09:23.1 AG: I don’t think that NP programs cover enough of the career prep, job search part of the process. So, glad that we’re able to dive into that today. This is what my resume looked like in 2011, and it was fine, I got interviews, I got a job, it served the purpose. But in hindsight, knowing what I know now, I’m able to point out some flaws about how I approached this. So it was crammed with information, there was not a lot of white space, meaning it was not very scannable. You look at it, it’s very busy. And there was no personalisation to the job. I had one resume and that one resume went out to all my job applications. And this is my resume today. It has essential and valuable information, it’s more visually appealing and it’s personalized to a specific job. And we’ll go into the details of where and how you can personalize your resume. We’ll also talk about one-page versus two-page, we’ll talk about resume versus CV, because those are the big questions that I get a lot, and the big things that I think, will probably get you the most clarity as you start down this process and make improvements to what you already have, if you have anything already at all.

0:10:51.8 AG: So, a powerful resume and cover letter can make you look like the ideal candidate, and that’s really what you’re going for. So I’m gonna break up the lecture tonight, into the three best practices, the first being, personalize your documents for each position, the second being, commit to a clean layout and format, and the third being, writing the job that you want, not for the job that you have, or that the jobs you’ve had in the past. So best practice number one. First, we’re gonna talk about why it’s important to personalise your documents and where to do it. And so have you ever received a text message or a Facebook message, and you could tell that it was very clearly copied and sent to approximately 47 people? I’m sure everyone has been the recipient of that, whether it’s a happy holidays type of message or any other type of message. But you know when something was not written directly to you, and it doesn’t feel good, especially if someone is asking something of you or trying to sell you something. Bottom line is, we all want to feel special and chosen. That is part of the human connection, part of purpose for a lot of people.

0:12:22.7 AG: So this little tweak, this step of personalising your documents and taking that time to do that, can really go a long way, because employers and hiring managers, they’re people too, they’re on the other end, doing a job. So I think any opportunity that we have, to connect with them or show them that we understand that they’re a real person on the other end of that relationship, I think, can go a long way. So that’s something that I’m really adamant about is, personalising your documents.

0:12:57.9 AG: So what do I mean when I’m saying that? What types of things are we personalising? So the first place that you can personalise would be in your professional summary. And your professional summary is a paragraph or a few bullet points that goes under your name, formally known as the objective section, which is kind of an antiquated practice. But the professional summary is an area where you give a summary of your best experiences, the highlights of the value that you bring to an organisation or to a position, and that’s where you can say the name of the organisation or the clinic or the role that you’re hoping to get. So at the end of that little blurb, you could say, “Seeking to transition into clinical practice at Memorial Hospital’s Internal Medicine Department,” or something like that, just being super clear with that little statement, that, “I have written this resume just for you,” and it tells the recipient that you didn’t just take one resume, go down every job on Indeed.com and just hit apply, apply, apply, apply. So that’s a little thing that can go a long way.

0:14:13.8 AG: You can also and you should also personalise your cover letter. And the ways you can do that, the places you can do that are who you address it to. So rather than saying, “To whom it may concern,” you could go a little bit further to try to discover who it is that will actually be receiving the letter. So let’s say you’re applying to a private practice, for example, you could address it to the medical director or the office manager, you could make a phone call or look on their website or look on LinkedIn, to figure out who the office manager is. So you could say, “Dear so and so, and the hiring committee,” or something like that. You may not always be able to get that information, but even if you can’t, rather than saying, “To whom it may concern,” saying, “Dear hiring manager,” or, “Dear recruitment team,” something like that is just a little bit… It goes a little bit of an extra step, to personalise that document.

0:15:12.4 AG: Now, this is my framework that I like to recommend for cover letters, and the thing about cover letters is, you can write a master version of your cover letter. Basically, everything that you want to put in your cover letter and then go back and modify things appropriately, depending on the different jobs you’re applying to. So in your first paragraph, you’re gonna wanna be a little bit personal, you may wanna tell an anecdote and also state your intention for the role that you want. So rather than saying, “I am excited to apply for this vacancy at your institution,” you could say, “When I saw the posting for the nurse practitioner position in Memorial’s Internal Medicine Department, I knew I’d be a great fit,” or something like that, just a small little tweak. And you can create your own template, your own master document and put little brackets where you know that you need to change things out with each one, to make it easy on yourself, so that you’re not writing a new cover letter every time.

0:16:18.2 AG: In that middle paragraph, you are gonna highlight your achievements thus far, your experience, maybe something from your clinical rotations or something notable about your experience, and depending on what your experience looks like, maybe you’re going to talk about different experience points, depending on the job you’re applying to. So if you’re applying to an ER or urgent care position and you have background as an ER nurse, maybe you’re gonna talk about that. But if you are applying to an outpatient clinic, maybe you’re gonna talk more about your transferable skills, as opposed to your hands-on skills, running a code or in the trauma bay or something like that. So making sure that you are calling out the experience that most aligns with that future role that you are applying to. And depending on what types of jobs you’re applying to, that could vary, if you’re applying to a variety of different types of positions or different specialties.

0:17:23.6 AG: And then the last paragraph is a great opportunity to summarise, but also mention the institution’s values. Maybe there’s something in their value statement or their mission statement that really resonates with your personal philosophy as a provider, and that’s a great opportunity to personalise that last paragraph. You could also say something like, you’re looking forward to working with them on improving outcomes for, insert the demographic here. So improving outcomes for oncology patients at Memorial Hospital, if you are applying for an oncology position, just as an example. Just checking to see if any questions came in.

0:18:13.8 AG: So, personalising, super important. I’ve got some examples. So here’s an example of how to do this in a cover letter. This particular example is for a nursing position, but the example, I think, holds true for NP positions as well. So here’s a second paragraph, “Nursing combines my passions, advocating for women’s rights, providing care, educating others and studying science. After 14 years of heavy involvement in women’s health, I’m still readily passionate about supporting women through their infertility journey. When I saw the position for the IVF RN, I knew I would be the perfect fit.” So that’s very specific. Not, “When I saw the job at your institution,” it’s very specific, and that didn’t take very long to kind of switch that out. And then in the last paragraph, “I’m confident I will bring undeniable passion, rich experience and genuine dedication to Columbia University. I would be honored at the opportunity to speak with you about how we can work together to compassionately meet the conception needs of hopeful families.” So see how those little tweaks are super personalised, but really, it’s not a lot of words you need to change, basically.

0:19:30.2 AG: Here’s an example of a professional profile or a professional summary. This isn’t necessarily personalised for an institution, but it does portray relevant value for specific roles. “So proficient and efficient nurse practitioner with eight plus years of clinical experience, mostly in emergency and hospital medicine, recently relocated to greater NYC, extensive experience managing acute and chronic conditions in the hospital setting. Practices shared decision-making in patient-empowered healthcare, provider of compassionate, empathetic care with the personal belief that healthcare is a right, not a privilege.” This is mine, by the way. But if you can see that the first few sentences call out the specificity of a location and also the area of my practice, while also being front and center about my practice philosophy as a provider. So there are ways that you can tweak this to best fit you.

0:20:36.2 AG: Here’s another profile from a new NP who had specific interests. In this case, it was rural health. “Authentic and dependable new graduate NP with eight plus years of intensive care, float pool and long-term care experience.” Let’s see. “Current member of AANP and the Arkansas Association of Nurse Practitioners. Passionate about rural health care.” So this isn’t necessarily, again, specific to a role. They could have changed that up, but still, the fact that it’s not super generic and is highlighting their experiences and also their interests is really, really helpful and still kind of a level up from the generic version.

0:21:29.1 AG: Okay, best practice number two is, committing to a clean layout and format. Now, while the layout means absolutely nothing, if the content of your resume is poor quality, you definitely want to make an effort for it to be in a good outfit. So the best outfit for a resume, in my opinion, is a clean layout in a format that is easy to scan with the eye. Let’s see. Hang on, I just wanna grab this question. Chris, I’ll answer that at the end. So I want to encourage you to have something that when you look at, it’s pleasing to the eye, not because that’s what’s going to necessarily land you the interview, but it’s something that will make that process a whole lot easier, it’ll make the important, content-rich pieces of your resume be absorbed better, by whoever is reading it. So a question, and feel free to let me know in the chat. Do you know the difference between a CV and a resume? Do you know which one you need? Is this something that you feel really clear on or is this something that is confusing? I’m gonna go into the differences anyway, but I would love to kind of gauge where you’re at, if you’re watching.

0:23:06.2 AG: So a curriculum vitae, which is what CV stands for, and a resume, are quite different. But often, the terms are used interchangeably. So, a lot of times, regardless of the term that they’re using, many employers, at least for clinical positions, are actually asking for the same document. So they’re terms that are confused a lot. In their true definitions, they are different. And there is a time and a place for both. For the majority of clinical positions, they’re asking what they want to see, something that we would more traditionally identify as a resume, and for academic faculty positions, research, those are usually looking for a traditional CV. So let’s get into the differences in their true definition.

0:24:02.9 AG: So a curriculum vitae is something that has more of an academic or research focus. It’s multiple pages, depending on your accomplishments. Often, it’s quite long. A couple of years ago, I did a CV for my former NP advisor from grad school, and her CV was 13 pages long, and it’s a very traditional layout. Rather than focusing on chronology, it goes kind of section by section. So a traditional CV, usually, you have research projects, you have presentations, lectures, academic appointments, symposia, you’ve presented at poster presentations, that type of thing. And usually, if you’re applying for a faculty position or if you are participating in a research experience, when they ask for your CV, this is the type of document that they want on file. If you’re applying for a board position or something with a foundation or a non-profit, that type of thing, like a board of nursing with a state or a professional organisation, they are usually looking for true CVs, which is this academic-focused, everything you’ve ever done, type of document.

0:25:27.2 AG: Here are the traditional sections for a CV. So, obviously, your name and demographics, your education, your licensure, honors and awards, and that top four also goes on a resume too, for the most part. Funded grants, employment history, scholarly work, professional memberships, community organisational service, patents and copyrights, thesis, scholarly projects, etcetera. So you can see how someone who’s very prolific in the academic and research world, would have a very, very lengthy CV.

0:26:07.1 AG: Now, a traditional resume is more of a clinical focus. It includes a summary at the top. It’s personalised for a position and is usually one to three pages. So a CV usually doesn’t have an objective to it, meaning, you’re not usually using your CV in order to get a job, it’s more of providing a long biography, I guess, is a way to give that analogy. So for a resume, most clinical positions, when they’re hiring nurse practitioners, with the exception of a position that also includes a faculty appointment, let’s say you’re at an academic medical center, they’re not looking for your 13 pages of work, they’re looking for your relevant clinical work. So the sections on a resume usually include name, demographics, of course, professional summary, education experience, work experience, licenses and certifications, and then the professional extras, that is what I call them. So memberships, community service, advocacy, you can include relevant research committees, leadership, etcetera.

0:27:26.2 AG: So if I’m someone who has done research or had any publications; and I’ve had a handful, nothing remarkable, I’m going to only include ones on my resume that are relevant to the clinical position that I’m applying to, when I submit my resume. So my resume is two pages, and on the second page, I’ve got a section for select publications, and I’ll feature anything notable that is also applicable, that would impress the hiring manager who’s hiring me for a clinical position, not necessarily for a research position. So let me know if there are questions about that, because it’s definitely a question that I get often is that, “I have a resume, but someone’s asking for a CV. How do I convert it?” And you may, it may be applicable for you to change up the formatting or add additional things, but especially for the majority of new graduate nurse practitioners, you likely are going to be submitting a resume, which can kind of be a hybrid, because if you have some of these professional extras, they’re certainly good to include if they are relevant.

0:28:48.0 AG: Yes, LinkedIn handle under the demographics, I think that is a great choice. I’m a big fan of LinkedIn. I think that everyone should be on there. It’s a great tool to network, whether or not you have the intention of needing a new job. And yeah, it essentially can serve as your digital resume or your personal website. So there’s a way to shorten the URL. By default, when you make a LinkedIn profile, it’ll put your name and then a bunch of letters and numbers, and you can go into your profile and you can change that to something short and sweet, so that when you put it on your resume, the web address won’t be your name with a thousand letters afterwards.

0:29:40.7 AG: Okay. So my biggest piece of formatting feedback is, the importance of making sure that your resume is scannable, and this means creating white space for the eye to rest. And this is something that our brains and our eyes need, in order for us to comprehend bits of information at a fast pace. We need it not to be crammed with big blocks of text, we need to give the eye the opportunity to rest and comprehend. And if you haven’t heard these statistics, they say that hiring managers spend an average of 10 seconds, looking at your documents. So that’s why we talk about having something that is scannable, because the reality is, people are gonna look at your document and within 10 seconds, make some sort of judgment about whether they want to continue reading or be in contact with you.

0:30:46.5 AG: So the ways to do this would be, to differentiate your headers from the main content with either a different font, capital letters or some divider lines, not to cram things together, so you want to be really judicious of what you’re including. So make sure that everything you’re including is earning its spot on the page, and if things look like you have big blocks of text, the answer would be, to change things to bullets, if you haven’t done that already, rather than paragraphs. If it’s still too full, take a look and see if you have anything that’s filler content that you can remove, and if it’s still too full, then maybe you need another page. So I would favor a second page with a little more white space, as opposed to one page that’s basically a whole bunch of small, crammed text.

0:31:42.4 AG: The other thing you can consider, you can either do a single linear layout, meaning, you’re writing everything top to bottom, or I like a split layout, and I can show you, I think I have an example. When I showed you my resume, that’s a split lay out. So I have a column on the left side that has all the kind of short line information, so education, licensure and certifications, and then in the main, the two-thirds body of my resume is where I have my profile and my work experience and the things that are a little bit meatier. I just find that that saves a bit of space because I’m not wasting full lines on things that only take up a bit of the line, like education and stuff.

0:32:31.4 AG: And then the other thing is, to always save your resume as a PDF. I don’t recommend sending things as Word documents or as editable Google Docs, for a few different reasons. One of the reasons is that, depending on the device that someone views your resume, mobile devices don’t… Well, and even between PC and Mac, if you send something in a Word document, chances are, you could have the formatting messed up on the receiving end. So I know that if I’m trying to look at a word document on my iPhone and that Word document has any flare at all, whether it’s a different font or a layout or a column, it gets all jumbled, and what avoids that is, saving as a PDF, which is kind of like a digital photograph almost, meaning that it stays the same between all devices. So that’s my top reason for saving as a PDF. My second reason would be that, if you send us a Word document, I haven’t heard of this actually happening, but I would not want anyone to get their hands on your information and make any modifications to your document, or copy it or anything like that. So I’m a little bit of a stickler about that type of thing.

0:33:58.1 AG: Quick question. I have no publications, but I have a few process and quality improvement projects I have collaborated on. Should I include this in a resume? Absolutely. Chances are, I’m gonna guess that these probably are from your employer, while you were working at a position. So you can either include those underneath that job in your job history, or if you wanted to pull them out in another section, if you had other things to include for leadership or research or things like that, you could pull them out into their own section. But usually, those are great things to include underneath a particular job that you held. Now, if those were really, really relevant to a job that you’re applying to, then I would potentially call them out again, in the summary, especially if you made a big achievement and you really wanna showcase that front and center because it’s super relevant to the job you’re applying for. For example, if you were applying for a position that was a quality improvement NP position, you might want to really highlight and restate more than once, your quality improvement experiences in your past.

0:35:22.2 AG: Here are some examples of how you can make that formatting clean, by using different, simple design elements. So in this first example, you can see how this heading is in all caps. It’s actually in small caps, so it’s got a big capital and then little capital, and then a horizontal line. So that’s just a nice way to remind the eye and the brain that this is a heading, so that the brain can scan. And then these bullet points and the separation of the dates, leave that white space for the eye to rest, while also making it scannable. In this professional summary, this is a different font and it’s in capital and it’s bold. It’s not fancy, there’s not a ton of flare, but it’s different, and it’s bigger text. It’s different enough that you know that this is a place for your eye to land, while you’re scanning. And then these bullets make it so that there’s no big blocks of text. And this font itself is not a bolded font, and because it’s not bolded, there’s space between the letters, easier to scan, not as insulting to the eye.

0:36:50.8 AG: Okay, so best practice number three is, to write for the job that you want, not the jobs you’ve had. So something that I want you to understand, especially if you are a new graduate, your RN experience is absolutely valuable, but as I’m sure you’ve learned in school and in clinicals, the NP role is very, very different. So what I want to challenge you to do is, approach this process from the perspective of the employer, and your documents should really highlight what will enhance you as a provider, as opposed to focusing on your past achievements as a nurse. This takes a little bit of finesse. There’s no magic formula, but a lot of this is mindset. A lot of NPs, especially newer graduates, think, “How the heck can I do any of this, if I don’t have NP experience?” Or you may be feeling like you’re competing against others who have NP experience, and you may also have advanced quite nicely as an RN and feel like you would not be having this problem if you were applying for another RN job.

0:38:12.2 AG: All of that is totally normal, to feel, and a lot of that brings up some impostor syndrome. And what tends to happen is, we’re comfortable in our nursing expertise because we’ve gotten closer to the expert on that novice to expert model when we’re nurses and then what happens is, you become an NP and then you kinda get knocked to the bottom. And it’s a rough knock to the bottom, especially if you really have gotten really comfortable in your nursing expertise. So there are things in your past, whether through your NP training, or your education or even a previous career, if you’re a second degree nurse, that will make you a better NP. So even if you don’t have NP experience, there will be skills that you can leverage. But I want you to really think critically, to figure out what those things are, what that bridge is, between the experience you’ve had and the job that you want.

0:39:27.3 AG: So if you kind of think of a Venn diagram, so two overlapping circles, and on one side, you have your skills and expertise from your past experiences, and in the other circle, you have everything that that future NP job wants you to have. What your job is, is to find what overlaps in the middle, and it may not always be tactical skills, it may be soft skills. But whatever it is, you have to figure out what’s in the middle, so that you can showcase that and leverage that and use that as a bridge to get you from your previous job to your next job. It can be tempted to say, as an example, if you are really experienced ER nurse, and maybe you’re a trainer and you work triage and you’re in charge, and you’re team leader and assistant nurse manager, it may be tempting to lean on the hands-on skills that you have, but the reality is, if you’re applying for a primary care job, those hands-on skills are not really what you want to leverage for your primary care nurse practitioner job. What you want to leverage from that previous job might be patient education experience, working as part of a health care team, task prioritisation and time management, things that you still did well in your previous job, but are a little bit more in line with what that future job is looking for.

0:41:06.6 AG: So that’s part of why it can be important, to not just use the same resume and cover letter for everything, because depending on the roles that you’re seeking, that bridge in between those two positions may be totally different. A few ways that you can figure this out. I know, this is a full slide, so I will save some… I think we’ll have a few minutes at the end, if there are specific questions about this. So you can reflect on your previous clinical rotations and experiences, to think about your… What you’ve developed so far, about your personal philosophy, I guess you can say, as a provider. Maybe you’ll think about any patient demographics or sub-specialties that you particularly are interested in, you can summarise your NP clinical rotation experiences, especially if you’ve had anything that is unique or different than what’s expected from your specialty. On your resume, let’s say you’re really pivoting practice areas. That may mean that you condense your RN experience on your resume, so rather than 10 bullets about the hands-on skills that aren’t entirely relevant for this new role, you summarise it in three or four bullets and focus on those skills that are transferable, meaning those skills that are in the middle of that Venn diagram.

0:42:44.9 AG: Another option is a functional resume, which if you have really strong, transferable skills, that can be helpful, and I’ll show you what that looks like here. This can be really helpful if you are a Master’s entry or a direct entry NP, or if you have a previous career, that preceded your nursing experience, that you really want to highlight. So this is a summary followed by skills, abilities and values. So this, rather than featuring chronological or reverse chronological working experience, this calls out kind of high-level skills. So this was someone who’s an attorney, who wanted to get into a midwifery program, and they did, by the way. But it was really difficult to figure out what’s that bridge in between being an attorney and being a midwife. So we talked about cultural sensitivity and inclusion, transformational leadership, objectivity and self-awareness. This person also volunteered as a doula, so if we had gone that kind of traditional work experience focused resume, the doula experience would have kind of gotten lost, compared to the attorney experience, because it was technically volunteer, but really, the doula experience was even more of something to highlight, for this particular individual.

0:44:25.0 AG: Okay. Here are some examples of how a new grad could leverage interests and experiences without actual NP experience. So this is someone, an FNP who was really interested in rural health. So, “Warm, compassionate, dedicated NP, seeking to practice patient-centered care in underserved communities. Firm understanding of social determinants of health and how they affect quality of life. Two-time recipient of the prestigious ANEW Grant, funded by HRSA.” So that’s a grant for NP students who wanna work in rural communities. This person didn’t have any NP experience, but had experiences aligned with what they wanted to do in the future, as an NP. And in their cover letter, they talked more about their experience as a student, which was about their clinical settings. “I thrived in all my clinical settings. I’m a two-time recipient of the ANEW Grant,” which focuses on yada-yada. So this is someone who had several years of nursing experience, but what the bridge was, between their past experience and their future job, their bridge was really, the clinical experiences that they had in school.

0:45:52.3 AG: So, to recap, the three best practices we went over. First, don’t rely on a cookie cutter resume and cover letter to tell your story. You want to personalise as much as possible. Remember, we don’t wanna be the recipient of the mass happy holidays text. The second one, don’t clutter your documents or cram a ton of information into a small space. So pay attention to the layout and the formatting, so that your documents are easy to scan and easy to read, by the person who’s likely gonna spend less than a minute looking at them. And the third, don’t dwell on your past experiences at the expense of your future opportunities. So don’t let impostor syndrome or the discomfort with being new at something, keep you from showcasing what’s really going to matter to the future employers, to the hiring managers. Don’t play it safe and hide behind your nursing expertise, when you have likely other skills or more relevant skills that you can leverage for a future NP job.

0:47:07.7 AG: And there’s a lot more to your job search, than just hitting Apply. That’s kind of a quote of mine that I will leave you with, because as you can see, it’s kind of a complicated… The strategy is multi-faceted, it’s not necessarily complicated, but it’s multi-faceted, there are small things that you can change, that can make a big difference, and remembering that funnel at the beginning of the talk, that it’s not just your resume that’s important. It’s just a part of the process. So I think we saved a little time for questions. This is my contact information, by the way, if you’d like to reach out to me. I’m @theresumerx on Instagram. My website is, theresumerx.com, and my email is amanda@theresumerx.com. That’s all I got.

0:48:04.5 S1: Awesome. Thank you so much for that.

0:48:07.4 AG: You’re welcome.

0:48:09.0 S1: So packed with lots of information, so hopefully, everyone was taking notes and if you weren’t, that’s fine. Remember, you can always grab the replay in your portal. But with everything else, we’re absolutely going to be dropping homework for you. So we will have homework that falls in line with exactly what Amanda was saying. What I do want everyone to kind of take note of and have in their mind is that, we are going to have a thread. So we’re gonna email you and we’re gonna have a thread in our group, and we wanna have questions for Amanda, for when she comes back. So in the meantime, one of the quick things that you can do is, take a look at your resume and ask questions of yourself, as to maybe why we’re not getting the hits or what it looks like, or where you need things to be. And keep those questions in mind, and I will ask them for you, if you are too shy to ask them, or you can put them in the thread and show up that day, and you can ask them yourself.

0:49:12.0 S1: But there’s absolutely a few takeaways, especially towards the end, with all of that information that Amanda said. This is a strategy. So I wanna be very clear, she said it very quickly, but you guys, looking for a job and strategically positioning yourself with your resume, is absolutely a strategy, and you need to take it as that. This is not, “I’m just going to throw something together and put it out there,” and I think Amanda can agree with that.

0:49:43.0 AG: Yes.

0:49:45.4 S1: So it is absolutely a strategy and you have to leverage it that way. And also, like she said, don’t play it safe. I used to have a mentor who used to tell me, “Give yourself credit for what you’ve done.” So if you have, like she said, other skills that you have used as an RN on the floor, please know that that all transfers. It all transfers, but again, it’s all in the presentation, and it is all in how we word things. So give yourself credit. You guys are not just some new fledgling NPs who’ve never seen a patient before and who have no idea what to do when someone is standing in front of you. You guys have worked on a lot of things, sometimes because jobs make us work on things, like the continuous quality improvement stuff. So you guys have worked on things, you guys have been in groups in school, you really got to dig deep and use what you’ve done and give yourself credit for what you’ve done. So, Amanda, I just wanna thank you again. I can tell by the comments, that everyone who was here is very excited about the information that they received from you.

0:50:52.7 AG: Of course, my pleasure.

0:50:55.3 S1: Good, wonderful. Okay guys, so with that being said, as always, I am very protective of your time. Amanda and I, we’ll be back and we’ll be doing more so of a fire side chat next week, and so we’ll have a good time with that, because I’ve already got my questions together for Amanda. So just to help guide you guys, but hopefully, you got good information from this and we will see you next week. So take notes, start looking at your resumes. This is a long process, it is not a quick and easy process. So just be patient with yourself and we’ll see you then. Alright? Alright, everyone have a good night.