Home Health Aide Resume: Job Description & Sample

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Structure of a Home Health Aide Resume

Home health aides play a crucial role in caring for a patient’s condition, helping family members and maintaining the quality of life of elderly patients and the infirm. To show that you’ve got what it takes, highlight caregiver skills, sensitivity and professionalism in your resume. The structure of your resume will usually depend on the type of resume format you choose. There are three kinds of resumes:

• Chronological: Chronological resumes focus on experience. 
• Functional: Functional resumes focus on skills. This is good for candidates who lack professional experience. 
• Combination: Combination resumes showcase both skills and experience, making them beneficial for candidates with a few years of related experience. 

Header

The resume header section contains your personal details. In this section, you should include: 

• Full name
• Email address 
• Phone number
• Location (City and state) 

If you have a professional networking profile (e.g., LinkedIn), then you can also provide a link here. This is a good way of providing the hiring manager with more information about your experience and key accomplishments.

Resume summary

A resume summary will be your introduction to the hiring manager, giving an overview of your overall experience and skills. This section is designed to hook the hiring manager and convince them that you’re the ideal candidate for an aide position.

To do this, emphasize unique skills or professional experience that you think the hiring manager or recruiter will value. This section is only two to three sentences long, so it’s important not to over-explain. 

If you don’t have any experience, then you can use a resume objective, which highlights your top skills and explains your career intentions, specifically how the role you’re applying for aligns with your career goals. You can also explain how your industry knowledge and skills compensate for lack of experience.

Skills

Home health aides need many skills to assist patients and fulfill their daily responsibilities. Your skills section should contain a mixture of hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are role-specific and typically gained through experience, training and certification. Soft skills are transferable across multiple industries, and include abilities like interpersonal skills and communication. 

Healthcare professionals such as home health aides need a comprehensive understanding of patient care skills due to the sensitive nature of their responsibilities. If you’re looking for appropriate skills to include in this section, consider these bullet points: 

• Administering personal care (e.g., washing, personal hygiene, toileting)
• Noting vital signs and blood pressure 
• Pushing wheelchairs
• Organizing records of patients
• Maintaining a clean home environment (conducting light housekeeping)
• Providing emotional support to maintain well-being
• Organizational skills 
• Meal preparation
• Communication skills
• Nutritious meals and diet planning 
• First Aid 

Work history

Depending on the resume format you choose and the employer’s expectations, the work experience section may be the most important part of your resume. In this section, you need to provide a reverse-chronological list of your work experiences, starting from the most recent. For each job you’ve had, include brief bullet points that outline your top responsibilities and achievements as a caregiver. List the employer’s name and the dates you started and finished in each job. Try to include only relevant responsibilities to the role you’re applying for, targeting specific duties and skills the hiring manager is looking for.

Education

To become a certified home health aide, candidates usually need a certificate from The National Association of Home Care and Hospice (NAHC). This certifies that you have undertaken the necessary training to administer patient care and oversee home healthcare. In some cases, you might not need formal certifications, with some employers only requiring a high school diploma. 

In this section, you should include:

• The title of your qualification
• The institution name 
• The year you gained it

Do’s and Don’ts for a Home Health Aide Resume

Do:

• Use a resume template and resume builder to create a resume with the right structure. 
• Use the job description to guide what skills and experiences you mention in your professional summary, experience and skills sections. 
• Look over home health aide resume samples to inspire your resume content. 

Don’t:

• Include your high school GPA. This is redundant information. 
• Make your resume more than one page long unless you have many years of experience. 
• Forget to tailor your resume for each application – each job will emphasize different needs and skills, so update your resume to match.