Hospital Volunteer Resume

As a hospital volunteer, you provide valuable support to busy hospitals. By taking care of basic clinical and administrative tasks, you make the lives of both the patients and staff easier.

Now it’s time to convince a hospital you’re exactly who they need by writing a professional hospital volunteer resume. Here are four tips to get you started:

1. Format your resume correctly

To make your hospital volunteer application stand out, take the time to format your resume properly.

Professional formatting shows that you’ll take your role as a volunteer seriously, even if it’s unpaid. Using industry-standard formatting also makes your resume easy to scan and helps you communicate your skills quickly and clearly to employers.

Usually, you should format your hospital volunteer resume chronologically, starting with your most recent experience and moving backward. A typical chronological resume consists of five sections:

• Resume header: your contact information
• Resume summary: a 2–4 sentence summary of your qualifications
• Work experience: any relevant hospital or volunteer work you’ve done
• Education section: your formal qualifications
• Skills section: a list of your top skills related to the volunteer position you’re targeting

Don’t have any relevant hospital volunteer experience? Write a functional resume, which emphasizes your skills rather than your work history.

Also, use consistent style formatting on your resume. Here are three tips for keeping your formatting consistent:

• Pick a professional resume font, like Arial, in an easy-to-read 10–12 font size
• Set your margins to ½” to 1” on each side
• Save your resume as a PDF to fix your formatting in place

2. Feature your hospital volunteer skills

Hospitals are high-stress environments, so employers seek volunteers who can function successfully in emergency situations. So show you can handle the pressure by giving examples of your skills in all your resume sections.

Because of the many different tasks you’ll have as a hospital volunteer, you need to show a diverse set of skills on your resume.

Your skill set should include soft skills — natural abilities you use to interact with others — and hard skills you’ve learned through training. For example, while you’re not expected to have formal training, you should have a solid grasp of basic medical terms.

Here are some sought-after hospital volunteer hard and soft skills to add to your resume:

3. Emphasize your love for helping others

Having compassion for others is one of the most essential qualities for hospital volunteers to have. So highlight your ability to provide emotional support to patients in distress and help others in your resume objective. Your hospital volunteer resume objective sits at the top of your resume and describes your:

• years of volunteer or work experience (if you have any)
• educational background
• relevant soft skills that make you a suitable hospital volunteer

Here’s an example hospital volunteer resume objective that does just that:

You can also fit examples of your love for assisting patients throughout your work experience section, like this:

• Exhibit empathy and politeness during medical procedures, earning consistent praise from patients and hospital staff

4. Use impactful hospital volunteer-related action verbs

Another way to make your resume more effective is to start your work experience bullets with engaging action verbs.

Hiring managers are tired of overly used phrases like “responsible for” or “tasked with.” So replace them with dynamic verbs that show how you’re a proactive hospital volunteer.

Here’s an action verb describing an applicant’s positive contribution to a hospital:

• Enhanced patient care procedures by gathering, interpreting, and compiling case information

Here’s a list of other action verbs you can add to your hospital volunteer resume’s bullet points to make it more engaging: