Surgical Nurse Must-Have Resume Skills and Keywords

Are you interested in improving your job outlook and increasing your salary? How can you demonstrate that you are the most qualified candidate for a Surgical Nurse position? Of course continuing to gain experience working as a Surgical Nurse may be your best qualification, but there are other ways you can also develop your skills, like continuing education or volunteer opportunities. More immediately, however, you can be ready for your next opportunity or promotion by educating yourself about the duties, responsibilities, and required skills of a Surgical Nurse and making sure your resume reflects your experience properly.

In order to do so, you’ll want to know that employers commonly feature Medical-Surgical Nursing and Registered Nurse as the most prominent terms in their Surgical Nurse job descriptions, yet those who have held the position of Surgical Nurse and list it on their resume indicate Surgery and Hospital more predominantly. Do you know what you would list?

We designed the ZipRecruiter Career Keyword Mapper to help you solve this problem and hopefully improve your resume. Using machine learning tools paired with industry research, our Marketplace Research Team helped analyze millions of job postings and resumes to identify the most important keywords related to Surgical Nurse jobs. Our goal is to help you discover opportunities to improve your resume or to help you understand what skills and qualifications you need to be a Surgical Nurse or to advance your career into beyond this role.

Employers list the keywords Medical-Surgical Nursing and Registered Nurse in 50.78% of Surgical Nurse job postings. Having such a significant share of the pie suggests these terms are critical to your resume. Hospital, Clinic and Patient Care are still quite important, but a smaller sliceof the employer Surgical Nurse job postings with their combined total of 21.89%. At 18.03%, ACLS, Surgery, Telemetry, and Health Insurance appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Surgical Nurse skills and requirements according to employers.

Job seeker resumes showcase a broad range of skills and qualifications in their descriptions of Surgical Nurse positions. The top three keywords represent 41.31% of the total set of top resume listed keywords. Look to the Resume Checklist below to investigate how Surgery, Hospital, and Registered Nurse match up to employer job descriptions. Clinic, Basic Life Support, and Patient Care represent a very decent share of skills found on resumes for Surgical Nurse with 30.26% of the total. At 28.44%, Vital Signs, ACLS, IV, and Collaboration appear far less frequently, but are still a significant portion of the 10 top Surgical Nurse skills and qualifications found on resumes.

Here is a simple table of the top 10 skills and qualifications as listed by employers in Surgical Nurse job postings since January of 2018, followed by the top 10 skills and qualifications most commonly listed by people who held the title of Surgical Nurse on their resumes.

Our Resume Keyword Checklist is based upon an analysis of the most commonly found terms within both job descriptions and resumes for Surgical Nurse roles. Our algorithm helps isolate phrases and patterns to identify the most frequently recurring and reused keywords from each data source, while correcting for uncommon and outlier results. Various heuristic methodologies are then applied to ultimately create two top 20 lists of the most important and significant skills, certificates and requirements found within Surgical Nurse job postings and resumes. We then merge the two lists together and use a combination of statistics and rules-based scenarios to create a list that is audited by the Marketplace Research team, and finally turned into the checklist you see below. Our hope is that knowing this information can help you make your best impression with your next potential employer.

Employer job listings often list Basic Life Support, Clinic, Interventional, Patient Care, ACLS, Hospital, BSN, Collaboration, Inpatient, Scheduling or Surgery as requirements in Surgical Nurse job descriptions; however, job seekers mention them far less frequently on their resumes. If you possess any or all of these experiences, including these keywords prominently on your resume when applying for a Surgical Nurse role may help you stand out more to hiring managers.

Both employer job listings and resumes from people who’ve held the role of Surgical Nurse tend to always include skills and requirements found in this list. Whether you’ve only got Documentation, Communication Skills, Pediatrics, Electronic Health Records, Vital Signs, IV or Operating Room in your background and experience, make sure to highlight the term prominently on your resume. As a job seeker you’ll be competing with many others who are bound to have as many as you (or more!) of these common resume keywords highlighted in their application for a job as a Surgical Nurse.

At ZipRecruiter, we understand better than anyone the importance of using the right keywords to describe your experience — it’s crucial to attracting the right employers! We built our business on the ability to effectively match job seekers with employers using AI-technology that understands your resume and how likely you are to be noticed by a potential future employer. Having a ZipRecruiter profile that showcases your most relevant skills and abilities can help you get recruited into a new role as a Surgical Nurse. Get started on your journey with a new ZipRecruiter Profile today!