7 Things to Eliminate from Your Modern Dietitian Resume
When was the last time you updated your resume? If you're like most dietitians, you received general resume advice from a college guidance counselor or your DPD director during your dietetics education. Perhaps you’ve made a few tweaks here and there and updated it with new jobs, but you aren’t feeling 100% confident about the design or content.
While resumes aren’t the most glamorous or exciting documents to write, there have been some recent updates to resume writing in the past few years.
In this article, we will share 7 things to eliminate when writing your modern dietitian resume. The best part is that these are super simple to fix!
1:Your full home address.
For privacy reasons, you no longer need to include your full address on your resume. If a potential employer wants to reach you, they will call or email you.
With that said, you should still include your city and state so that an employer knows that you live within the geographic region. Even with a remote role, licensure can come into play, so I still recommend including your city and state.
If you are applying for a non-local position, make sure to include your relocation plans in your cover letter or professional summary. Employers often don’t want to risk hiring someone who will need a ton of extra time to relocate unless it’s a position that is hard to fill OR you are truly amazing!
Bottom line: Include your City and State in your resume headline and make any relocation plans very transparent.
2: Your GPA.
As dietitians and future dietitians, I know how hard you worked in your academic career to pursue the dietetic pathway. However, in the professional setting, your GPA is not relevant.
Your ability to achieve all As does not correlate to better work performance (for better or worse). If you achieved honors such as magna cum laude, you can elect to leave that on your resume under your education section. But consider removing this after a few years in the field. Again, grades really don’t correlate with your ability to perform in a job.
As a side note, don’t take up valuable resume real estate by having your education/schools listed at the top of your resume! As credentialed registered dietitians, we all have at least a bachelor’s degree. You can move your education section to the bottom of your resume and save this valuable space for more relevant and unique accomplishments.
3: An Objective Statement.
Objective statements are out! Not trendy. Long gone. Really the whole premise of an objective statement is pretty silly. If you’re applying for jobs, of course, your objective is to land a job!
Instead of an objective statement, add in a “Professional Summary” or a “Summary Statement”. Your summary statement should be your elevator pitch connecting your background to the position that you want to land.
You’ll want to include keywords for the position as well as any relevant accomplishments. However, these are only 3-5 sentences, so you’ll need to be super brief!
Here are a few examples of professional summaries for registered dietitians:
Innovative registered dietitian and chef with 10+ years of experience in management and recipe development. Areas of expertise include sustainable food systems, menu development and food procurement. Skilled in collaborative leadership and program management. Core accomplishments include securing a $10k grant and 12 community partners for a cooking competition event.
Registered dietitian and certified nutrition support specialist with 3 years of experience in clinical nutrition and patient education. Areas of expertise include complex and rare diseases and enteral and parenteral nutrition. Skilled in motivational interviewing, educational design and in-service presentations. Recently, presented to 100+ physicians at a local conference with excellent feedback from attendees.
4: A Headshot.
If you live in the US or Canada, headshots and personal pictures are a big no!
Recruiters and hiring managers have repeatedly stated that they prefer to evaluate candidates based on their experience and skills. Headshots introduce implicit and unintended bias. So skip the fancy Canva templates that include a headshot- yes they’re pretty, but unfortunately, they also aren’t ATS (applicant tracking system) friendly and may also be the reason why you aren’t landing a job.
Instead, you can link to your LinkedIn profile where you should have a very professional headshot.
You might be asking- what’s the difference? The difference is that someone is only going to click on your resume if they’re really interested in your background. They are doing this AFTER they have decided that you’re an excellent candidate.
As a side note, make sure that your LinkedIn profile is up to date if you’re including a link on your resume!
For more guidance, check out:
7 Essential Tips for Dietitians to Optimize Their LinkedIn Profile
5. Work experience from the 90s or from high school.
A common question is “How far back should you go in your experience”? Remember, a dietitian's resume should showcase your relevant experiences and demonstrate how you have the skills to be successful in the role.
In general, experiences that are over 15-20 years old can be removed from your resume. However, there are exceptions to this. If you’ve been at a position or a few positions for a long time, these may be your only experiences to highlight. In which case, you should keep them! But you shouldn’t feel compelled to keep every dietitian position you’ve ever held on your resume.
If you’re a newer dietitian without nutrition experience, you may be tempted to list your full work experience in high school/college. While it can be nice to have some past work experience, you don’t need to list every seasonal or babysitting job. Consolidate when you can and remove these experiences once you have other professional experiences.
If you’re a second-career dietitian, you can include an “Other Professional Work Experience” section and highlight some of your past roles. If there aren’t many transferrable skills or if you held several similar positions, you can consolidate them like this:
Corporate Event Planner, Various Companies (2005-2015)
Managed and directed conferences and events for 50-10,000 attendees.
Secured vendors, coordinated all aspects of vendor contracts and ensured seamless partnerships with 10-300 vendors per event.
6: Long paragraphs and a crammed resume.
Your resume needs to be skimmable! The only paragraph on your resume should be your professional summary and even this should be no longer than 3-5 sentences.
Remember, that white space is your friend! Your resume should be really clean and easy for hiring managers and recruiters to quickly skim.
You might be thinking skim??? I worked hard on my resume- I don’t want anyone to skim it, I want them to really read it. But the reality is that recruiters will quickly skim your resume before deciding to continue or not. Make it easy for them to do this.
Keep your bullet points to 2 lines or less.
And absolutely do not cram everything onto one page using 8-point font and really tiny margins.
This often leads to the question of 👇
Is a 1-page or 2-page resume preferred?
There isn’t a correct answer here. The most important guiding principle is that your resume should include experience that is relevant to the roles that you want to land.
This means that if you have ample relevant experience and it takes two pages, that is okay. If you do go onto the second page, then it looks better to have at least 1.5 pages or a full 2 pages rather than 1 page and a few lines.
If you are an entry-level dietitian with no other work experience, 1 page is probably sufficient!
7: “References Available Upon Request”.
Don’t waste valuable real estate on your resume with this sentence. Recruiters and hiring managers will ask for your references when the time is right!
Also, don’t put reference contact information on your resume. The last thing you want is for the recruiters to call your references without any warning. It is a common courtesy to reach out to your references first and to inform them of the role that you’re trying to land. This also allows you to prep your references on which strengths and highlights they might want to speak to that are specifically related to the job.
Bottom Line: You can provide references when they are acutally requested!
With this list of 7 things to avoid and eliminate on your modern dietitian resume, you’ll be on your way to impressing the hiring committee.
If you would like more guidance on how to create a standout resume, check out my other resources:
About the Author
Kelan Sarnoff, MS, RD is a Registered Dietitian with over 10 years of experience in the nutrition realm. She has experience in hiring and recruitment in both the clinical and academic settings. Kelan is passionate about helping dietitians land a job that aligns with their passion, values, and skills. She also believes in raising the pay for all dietitians and empowering dietitians to negotiate for desired compensation.
