As a Chief Nursing Officer (CNO), you stay on top of current nursing regulations so that the nursing staff can carry out daily patient care: You ensure policy compliance, manage finances, and connect patients with the best possible care while providing a sense of leadership and guidance.
But you might still have questions about your resume. How do you highlight the unique administrative specialties you offer within the medical setting? How should your resume look?
You’re going to do great: With your excellent communication skills and our three resume templates (plus some tips), you’ll be on the road to success in no time.
Why this resume works
- So, you want to craft the Swiss Army knife of CNO resume, right? We get it; it can sometimes feel a tad bit daunting. However, demonstrating that your cup overflows with not only skills but also compassion can put the hiring manager under a spell.
- When composing your work history section, weave in moments when you went out of your way to help others, even when you didn’t have to. A great example is organizing 4 community outreach programs to reduce the rate of drug overdose. It’s all about being a kind champion for change.
Related resume examples
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Experience History
Recruiters want to see that you can apply a well-rounded set of administrative, interpersonal, and patient care skills in your workplace. As a chief nursing officer, you’ll need to be highly specific with your skills and get particular while listing things like life support and quality assurance to show the scope of your management role.
Don’t go for generic skills that easily apply to other fields, like “record keeping” or “people skills”. Get more specific than that and list higher-level skills like “hospital and patient safety” or “fiscal aptitude” that show your level of advancement.
Check out these examples below for some ideas on the types of CNO-specific skills you can use to bolster your credibility and demonstrate versatility:
9 most popular CNO skills
- Basic Life Support
- Hospital Safety
- Quality Assurance
- Strategic Planning
- Fiscal Aptitude
- State Compliance
- Federal Regulations
- Patient Surveys
- ER Care
Sample CNO work experience bullet points
Now that you’ve lined up an impressive list of skills, it’s time to show how good you are at putting them into action—especially in high-demand situations. You may not have as much direct interaction with other patients as an LPN, for example, but you collaborate closely on a management level.
Various instances of directing, hiring, supervising, and administrative decision-making are all good examples of experiences you can include to highlight what sets your role apart. When did you organize helpful outreach programs? How about updating nursing staff on the most current regulations?
And make sure you measure your impact! You’ll need to provide quantifiable data like care quality ratings as metrics of your success.
For example:
- Trained 8 new nurses in the ER on best practices for patient documentation, reducing errors by 11%
- Implemented education on early overdose warning signs, reducing the likelihood of death by drug overdose by 8%
- Managed staff budgets, improving fiscal health by reducing staff turnover and saving $58K per month in training costs
- Maintained thorough performance evaluation systems, improving quality of care by 12% according to patient satisfaction surveys
- Generated compensation wages for the Covid-19 risk levels, improving staff fulfillment on the job by 46%
Top 5 Tips For Your CNO Resume
- Demonstrate growth
- Since your role is so high up in the nursing ecosystem, your resume needs to display a distinct trend of increasing complexity. Make your career advancement crystal-clear by using examples with increasingly impactful metrics and context.
- Organize carefully
- Using one of our templates makes this tip much easier—just make sure you’re picking the template that makes your greatest achievements stand out the most. If your patient satisfaction improvements and staff incentives shine brightest, let them stand front and center!
- Show your versatility
- Your job requires a great deal of thinking on your feet during unusual situations, such as sudden patient influxes during flu season or the urgent need to fill new nursing positions. Call upon a variety of contexts for your examples to show that you’re ready for anything!
- Never forget to proofread
- Don’t neglect your proofreading and error checking when it comes to your CNO resume! Your job is highly detail-oriented, so the stakes are higher when it comes to typos and other avoidable errors.
- Keep things readable
- Make sure you keep your resume super legible and clear by using modern, clean fonts. Don’t lose sight of your resume’s focus: Conveying information about your medical and technical qualifications to the recruiter who skims it over.
Just stick with one page for your CNO resume, even if your experience is extensive! Recruiters won’t spend longer than a few seconds looking over your resume, so get to your best points quickly.
Yes, it’s always good to include your Nursing degree. List your two highest and most recent degrees to prove that you have what it takes in your field. Your degrees are to your education section what your metrics are to your experience points!
You might want to include one of these to sum up your array of experiences, make sure you present CNO qualifications that aren’t repeated later in your resume. Everything you say should be fresh and intriguing!
Stephen is the co-founder and CEO of BeamJobs. He started his career in data fulfilling the dream of little kids everywhere: working for an insurance company. He then moved on to work in edtech for a company called Chegg before venturing out to start BeamJobs. Things have come a long way after countless “learnings” (fancy word for mistakes), and BeamJobs has now helped 2.5M+ people create their perfect resume. Stephen and BeamJobs have been featured on awesome sites like Business Insider, Chicago Tribune, Dallas News, Baltimore Sun, the Daily Press, Zendesk, HubSpot, and loads more.
