Archive for the ‘Nurse Cover Letter Tips’ Category

Don’t Be Negative in your Nurse Cover Letter!

When you are writing your nurse cover letter, it can be easy to get caught up in the memories of your past jobs. I know I had some great memories at my old jobs and nursing school of the friendships I made and learning how to take a person’s blood pressure for the first time. But with good memories sometimes there are some negative ones that can sneak in like that teacher that always gave to much homework or that boss whom always seemed to have a chip on her shoulder. I wanted to avoid putting anything negative in my cover letter so I looked up a number of great tips to help you avoid this disastrous cover letter mistake.

Better to Be Positive than Negative

Just like in an interview one of the worst things you could do is talk about a bad boss or co-workers. Even if you had a difficult time, you want to write about the positive ways you helped the workplace with patients rather than to bag on your old boss. This may seem obvious but you better believe there are job hunters that do it! Even if you want to let the interviewer know that you are a better employee for going through the difficult work experience, it is better to avoid the subject altogether. You always want to show the best side of yourself in your resume cover letter so that you get the interview and the job!

Work Experience

I know that when I graduated from school, I was a little light on the work experience in the healthcare field. But part of the cover letter is to let the interviewer know that you are up for the job because you have experience. I did complete an internship at a local hospital while I was in school so I talked loads about what I did during my time there. Highlighting all of the tasks I completed from reading charts, taking temperatures, talking with patients and such. I also talked about my past non healthcare job as a cashier because it has a relation with customer service which is important for nurses to have good bedside manner and it taught me to relate to people in a friendly manner. Now I didn’t go on about how some of the customers were very rude but I did discuss how it taught me about customer service which is basically serving the customer in the best way possible. Showing that I had experience and relating my non hospital customer service experienced really helped me by actually getting interviews for numerous nursing jobs.

A Few Other Tips

One thing that made the idea of nursing cover letters stressful to me was the fact I didn’t plan ahead before I started to send out resumes. Luckily there are now numerous sources of how to write cover letters information for those who want to write the perfect cover letter.

Lastly I want to say that, no matter how well you write things, writing a 3 page cover letter will not look very good for you as a job candidate. So try to stick to a one page maximum for your nursing cover letter so it doesn’t take the interviewer 20 minutes to read it!