You fulfill a unique set of needs in nursing home settings, providing everything from clinical care and daily activities to end of life care. Patient advocacy also makes up an important part of your duties, as does record keeping and organization of social service progress notes.
But you may not be so confident about how to handle your resume. Where should details about patient care go, and how should it all look when you’re done?
We’ve got this, no problem: Just like all the other social workers who have found success with these three resume templates, you should be all set once you read through our handy advice!
What Matters Most: Your Skills & Work Background
Your skills are super important! Recruiters need to see that you’re qualified for the job, and they’re interested in any unusual or niche abilities, too. Don’t get too caught up in tangents, though: Any skill you list should relate directly to social work or elder care.
While your job role centers heavily around soft skills, you’ll want to get more technical in your actual skills section. Show your interpersonal grace through your experience points instead! Here in your skills list, focus more on technical, profession-specific abilities that benefit the elderly.
If you use any types of software to get your work done, name the programs. If you have a certain methodology or self-management ability that makes a huge difference within your nursing home, specify!
9 best nursing home social worker skills
- Time Management
- Calendar Creation
- Adaptability
- Empathy
- Case Management
- Problem-Solving
- MS PowerPoint
- Google Sheets
- First Aid / CPR
Sample nursing home social worker job experience bullet points
Possessing the skills needed to excel in your job role is a great start—but how have you used them to create results in the past? Recruiters want to know! When you show examples of the good you’ve already done for patients in your facility, you show how beneficial you’ll be in your next workplace.
Just like your skills, every bullet point in your experience list should be unique to the job role and highly specific. You want to show why you belong in nursing home social work!
And don’t forget to measure your impact with quantifiable data. Recruiters want to see the numbers that prove you aren’t all talk! Share information like patient satisfaction percentages and positive ratings to boost your credibility and intrigue.
Here are a few examples:
- Monitored patients’ progression and regression, adjusting care plans to ensure effectiveness and efficiency of services, helping patients meet 32% more of their goals
- Provided support and created individual care plans to assist over 489 elderly residents as they adjusted to long-term care, increasing patient satisfaction by 21%
- Assisted residents in resolving familial issues such as estrangements and helped patients with wills, trusts, and advanced directives, earning a personal positive feedback rating of 4.7/5.0 stars
- Educated residents and families on disease processes and end-of-life issues and connected them with over 54 facility and community resources, boosting social engagement survey ratings by 27%
Top 5 Tips for Your Nursing Home Social Worker resume
- Show personability through tone
- Revisit the job description to get an idea of its writing tone, which will then give you some insight regarding what that specific nursing home is like. You’ll want to model your resume’s phrasing after this insight and use it to show how your personality aligns!
- Pare down your bullet points
- When you get into social work or health-related experience points, it can be easy for things to get too bulky before you know it. Keep readability in mind and strive to keep your bullet points to two lines or less.
- Style things tastefully
- Use the job description to gauge what each facility’s work environment is like in terms of professionalism vs. friendliness. But even when you’re working with a really laid-back, homey setting, minimize any colors or fancy fonts on your resume. Prioritize legibility!
- Keep it brief
- We know you’re already familiar with how you should keep your bullet points concise, but bear in mind that your entire resume should be pretty trim, too: You have only one page to impress recruiters with knowledge of elder-focused social work!
- Show adaptability
- Versatility and the ability to adapt to a broad set of changing circumstances are both excellent skills for a nursing home social worker to have. You can demonstrate your capabilities here by mixing up your examples—include mixing in a satisfaction percentage here and an engagement increase there.
This isn’t a bad idea, especially if your job history comprises mostly of other types of social work or medical practice. And having other people to back up your claims always boosts your credibility!
Go for it! Any experience points that you struggled to fit on your single resume page would fit perfectly here. Use any “leftovers” to repurpose into a shiny foundation for an interesting and memorable cover letter that demonstrates your likeable bedside manner and planning skills.
Some people are better off without a resume summary or objective statement. But if you have new, eye-catching information to add that isn’t found elsewhere on your resume, it’s time for an objective statement—especially if you’re just switching or entering your career in nursing home social work!
