Home Health Aide Resume

You’re compassionate and have the caregiving experience to show for it, but that doesn’t mean your resume highlights that compassion and experience.

Convince employers you’re capable of providing exceptional patient care with a thoughtful resume, and you’ll be well on your way to landing your next fulfilling opportunity in home health care.

Use these three tips to write a home health aide resume that proves you’re the right person to assist clients with their daily-life activities:

1. Highlight your home health aide skills

A strong home health aide resume showcases your patient care experience, attentiveness, patience, communication skills, attention to detail, reliability, and medical knowledge.

Emphasize key home health aide technical skills in the skills section of your resume to show employers you have the right skill-set to care for patients with diverse needs, such as checking vital signs, administering medications, and first aid training.

Modify your resume bullet points to highlight these job-specific hard skills so employers can see you’re an excellent fit with a quick glance of your resume.

Here are other key home health aide skills to include in your resume:

• Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and Outlook)
• Maintaining patient records
• Providing care in various health care settings
• Assisting with daily living activities
• Housekeeping
• Personal care
• Meal preparation
• Certified Nurse Assistant (CNA)
• CPR

Because you’ll be working closely with patients across a wide range of ages and health concerns, it’s critical to highlight a variety of hard and soft skills to prove you can both communicate with and take care of patients whenever necessary.

Here are important home health aide soft skills employers look for:

• Compassion
• Empathy
• Active listening
• Accuracy
• Organizational skills
• Time management skills
• Communication skills
• People skills
• Problem-solving skills
• Language skills 
• Decision-making
• Teamwork
• Adaptability
• Physical stamina
• Ability to work under pressure

Not sure how to fit these skills into your home health aide resume? Here are a few examples of how to touch upon them in your work experience section:

• Delivered compassionate care and support to 20+ disabled and elderly patients in performing activities of daily living
• Provided care to 6+ level 4 Parkinson’s patient requiring 24 hour a day care, including bathing, dressing, catheterization, PT, ambulatory assistance, and travel assistance
• Monitored changes in patients’ conditions, maintaining and updating records of patients’ progress and health condition

2. Open with a strong home health aide resume summary

Because most job applicants have the knowledge and training required to assist clients with daily activities, simply stating your qualifications won’t be enough to stand out from those who have similar qualifications.

To make your resume stand out more, open with a strong resume summary to show employers why you’re uniquely qualified. With only minutes — or seconds — to catch the attention of a hiring manager who has countless job applications to review, knowing how to effectively promote yourself in your resume summary increases your chance of getting a callback.

Here’s an example of an effective home health aide resume summary:

Home Health Aide with 10+ years of experience in delivering excellent care, assistance, and nursing services in home care settings. Instrumental in maintaining a safe and clean environment, recording and reporting vital signs, and changes in patients’ health condition.

In this example, the applicant successfully sums up their skills and experience delivering care in home health-care settings in two short sentences. They directly hit upon their strengths from the beginning, and then highlight essential home health aide skills, such as housekeeping, monitoring vital signs, and maintaining patient records.

3. Customize your home health aide resume to the job posting

Due to the intimate nature of this job, it’s critical to show employers you have both knowledge and passion to support the well-being of clients with specific needs.

Before you begin your resume, analyze the home health aide job posting to identify skills the employer is looking for. Use this information to customize your resume to the job, so that employers can immediately recognize you’re a perfect match.

Here’s how to customize your home health aide resume to the job:

• Avoid wordiness. For a home health aide position, a one-page resume is most effective for presenting your qualifications succinctly. However, if you have 10+ years of experience providing patient care, feel free to use more space.
• Include relevant information only and cut out any jobs where the skills aren’t transferable. For instance, your graphic design skills probably won’t come in handy as a home health aide.
• In your resume bullet points, focus on your achievements rather than listing your past responsibilities. Use strong home health aide action verbs to make your contributions more meaningful. For example, “Achieved 99.9% patient satisfaction rating based on exceptional care delivery.”

Optimize your resume with home health aide keywords so it’s more attractive to hiring managers and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). For example, HHA, Housekeeping, Senior Care, Elderly Care, and Home Care.