The Start here guide explains how to find the postings that fit a non-clinical degree. This page concerns the document you send once you have found them. Informatics hiring is unusual in that your resume is read twice by two very different people, first by a recruiter who may never have opened an electronic health record and then by an analyst manager who opens one every day, and it has to persuade both of them in roughly the time it takes to skim a page. Everything below is aimed at that double audience.
With thanks to r/EngineeringResumesMuch of the advice on this page is adapted from the wiki, templates, and reading list that the moderators and members of r/EngineeringResumes maintain for engineers and scientists (r/EngineeringResumes, n.d.-f). Their guidance on bullet points, keywords, and applicant tracking systems translates closely to informatics, where the readers are similarly technical and similarly pressed for time. We have rewritten it for people applying to clinical and health informatics roles without a clinical license and added what is particular to this field, but the underlying ideas are theirs, and their full resource list appears at the end of this page.
A resume does not get you the job. Its only task is to get you a phone screen, and every line that does not serve that purpose spends attention you cannot spare (Singh, n.d.). That attention is brief: in a 2018 eye-tracking study by Ladders, recruiters spent an average of 7.4 seconds on their first pass through a resume before deciding whether to keep reading, and the layouts that held their attention were plain ones with clear section headings, bulleted accomplishments, and generous white space, while cluttered pages, multiple columns, and long sentences fared worst (Ladders, 2018, as cited in O'Donnell, 2018). Seven seconds is long enough to read your most recent title, your degree, and the first bullet or two under each role. Put the evidence that you can do informatics work in exactly those places, and move everything else down the page or off it.
Choose a single-column layout with conventional section headings (Education, Experience, Projects, Skills, and Certifications) and order them so that your strongest section comes first. A recent graduate with a substantial capstone or thesis may reasonably lead with Education and Projects; anyone with relevant work should lead with Experience. Leave out tables, text boxes, icons, skill bars, and photographs, which confuse the software that parses your file and the person who reads it in equal measure. Submit a PDF unless the posting asks for Microsoft Word (Microsoft, n.d.-b), give the file a name that carries your name and the role, and keep it to one page until you have enough relevant experience to fill a second one honestly, which for most people means something close to a decade. Doctoral candidates and postdocs should write a two-page resume for industry and health system roles and reserve the full curriculum vitae for academic appointments, because a hiring manager paging through a twelve-page CV will rarely find the three lines that matter to the role. The r/EngineeringResumes templates (r/EngineeringResumes, n.d.-c), available free in Google Docs (Google, n.d.-b) and LaTeX (LaTeX Project, n.d.), meet every one of these conditions, and starting from one of them is far easier than undoing a word processor's decorative defaults.
The most common weakness in early-career informatics resumes is the bullet that describes a duty rather than a result: "responsible for data entry," "assisted with chart review," "used SQL." Three formulas, all explained in the r/EngineeringResumes wiki (r/EngineeringResumes, n.d.-f), help convert duties into evidence. The XYZ formula, popularized by Laszlo Bock when he was senior vice president of people operations at Google, asks you to state what you accomplished, how it was measured, and how you did it (Bock, 2014). STAR (situation, task, action, result) and CAR (challenge, action, result) arrive at the same destination by beginning from the problem. Whichever you prefer, every bullet should name an action you took, the system or data you took it in, and what changed because you did. Numbers strengthen a bullet when they are real: record counts, turnaround times, error rates, users trained, sites supported. A defensible approximation is acceptable when you do not know a figure precisely; an invented one is not, because a capable interviewer will ask how you measured it.
| Duty as usually written | Rewritten as evidence | Why it reads better |
|---|---|---|
| Responsible for data entry in REDCap for a cardiology study. | Built and validated a 140-field REDCap database for a 300-participant cardiology study, adding branching logic and range checks that reduced data queries at monitoring visits. | Names the system, the scale, and the outcome a research informatics manager cares about. |
| Ran clinical laboratory tests. | Mapped 85 in-house laboratory test codes to LOINC ahead of an interface go-live and resolved the mismatches flagged during validation. | Translates bench experience into terminology and interface work. |
| Used SQL and Excel for reporting. | Automated a weekly HEDIS care-gap report in SQL and Power BI, replacing a two-day manual spreadsheet process for a team of six care managers. | Shows the tools, the measure set, the time saved, and who benefited. |
| Taught lab sections. | Led weekly laboratory sections for 45 undergraduates, writing the step-by-step protocols and troubleshooting guides they relied on. | Training and supporting end users is a defined duty of every application analyst role. |
The figures in these examples are illustrative. Use your own, and only ones you can explain. Systems and standards named in the table: REDCap (Harris et al., 2009, 2019), LOINC (Regenstrief Institute, n.d.), HEDIS (National Committee for Quality Assurance [NCQA], n.d.), and Microsoft Power BI and Excel (Microsoft, n.d.-a, n.d.-c).
The moderators of r/EngineeringResumes report that the complaint they hear most often from hiring managers concerns not formatting but keywords: resumes that describe relevant work in words the posting never uses (r/EngineeringResumes, n.d.-b). In informatics the problem is acute, because the field's vocabulary is precise and the first reader often matches it literally. A recruiter searching the applicant database for "Clarity" will not find the candidate who wrote "Epic reporting database," one searching for "CCL" will miss the candidate who wrote "Cerner reports" rather than naming Cerner Command Language, the reporting language of Oracle Health Millennium ("Cerner CCL," n.d.), and one scanning for "LOINC" will pass over "standardized lab codes." Read the qualifications and responsibilities closely and note the systems (Epic Clarity and Caboodle, Oracle Health Millennium and CCL, REDCap, Medidata Rave), standards (HL7 version 2, FHIR, LOINC, SNOMED CT, ICD-10-CM, OMOP), measure sets (HEDIS, CMS electronic clinical quality measures), regulations (HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11), and verbs (build, validate, abstract, map, go-live support, requirements gathering) that the posting names, then use the same words wherever they truthfully describe what you did (Epic Systems Corporation, n.d.; Oracle, n.d.; Harris et al., 2009, 2019; Medidata Solutions, n.d.; HL7 International, n.d.-a, n.d.-b; Regenstrief Institute, n.d.; SNOMED International, n.d.; National Center for Health Statistics, n.d.; Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics [OHDSI], n.d.; NCQA, n.d.; eCQI Resource Center, n.d.; Office for Civil Rights, n.d.; Electronic Records; Electronic Signatures, 2026). Translate academic phrasing into the employer's as well: a thesis cohort becomes a cohort definition from EHR data, reviewing patient records for a study becomes chart abstraction, and a lab's sample tracking software becomes a laboratory information system. Then exercise restraint. A skills section that lists every tool you have ever opened reads as padding (Singh, n.d.), and any term on the page is fair game in the interview, so include only those you could discuss comfortably for five minutes. The vocabulary each track expects is listed on the Career tracks page.
Much of the anxiety surrounding resumes comes from the belief that software rejects most applications before a person sees them. The evidence is both more reassuring and more specific. When Enhancv interviewed 25 recruiters in the United States, healthcare among their industries, 23 said their applicant tracking system did not reject resumes automatically on the basis of formatting or content; the two who used automatic rejection had deliberately configured thresholds, such as a minimum share of required skills (Vasileva, 2025). Fewer than half had an artificial intelligence match score available, and most of those treated it as a guide rather than a verdict. Vendors describe the same arrangement, with recruiters reviewing applications themselves once a short set of screening questions has been answered (Team Lever, 2021). The practical conclusion is that services promising to make a resume "ATS-proof" are not worth the money: the system stores, parses, and searches your resume, and a person decides (Orosz, 2020). Automated filtering is nonetheless real, and it resides in the criteria employers choose. In a survey of 2,275 executives in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, more than nine in ten employers that used recruiting software relied on it to make the first cut or to rank applicants, and a majority acknowledged that their configured criteria screened out people who could have done the work (Fuller et al., 2021). For informatics applicants, those criteria appear in one place more than any other: the questions on the application form.
Before or after you upload a resume, most large employers ask a handful of eligibility questions: whether you are authorized to work in the country, whether you live within reach of the worksite, whether you hold the required degree, and, in this field, whether you hold an active clinical license (an RN, NP, PA, MD, DO, PharmD, or similar) or a particular Epic or Oracle Health certification. Recruiters configure these as knockouts, and a "no" to a required item can end an application before anyone reads the resume (Orosz, 2020; Vasileva, 2025). This is the practical reason the board marks every listing green, amber, or red for licensure. A red listing will very likely ask the question and reject the answer, whereas a green or amber one usually will not. Read every question carefully before answering. When a form asks whether your degree is "in a related field," you are entitled to judge that a biology, computer science, public health, or engineering degree is related when the posting's own degree line suggests as much. When it asks about a certification the posting describes as sponsored after hire, answer truthfully that you do not yet hold it, since that is the answer the employer anticipates. Never claim a license or certification you do not hold. Both are verified, and the consequence of a false answer is not a rejection but a rescinded offer.
Scientists and graduate students frequently have more relevant experience than their resumes admit, because academic titles conceal it. A research assistantship in which you cleaned, merged, and documented clinical datasets is clinical data management, and you should say so and name the tools. Teaching laboratory sections is training and supporting end users. Running a study's database is clinical research informatics. Work as a medical scribe, research coordinator, pharmacy technician, or phlebotomist demonstrates that you understand clinical workflow without holding a license, which informatics teams value highly, so place it where the reader will see it. Publications and presentations belong on an industry resume as a short selected list, or as a single line pointing to your Google Scholar profile (Google, n.d.-a), rather than in full citation format. Doctoral candidates should describe the dissertation as a project with methods and outcomes in two or three bullets and save the theoretical framing for the interview, where it will be received far better.
A resume improves most quickly when someone outside your own head reads it. r/EngineeringResumes reviews resumes from engineers and scientists across disciplines, including biomedical and healthcare work; read its wiki and posting rules first (r/EngineeringResumes, n.d.-f), and its moderators' note on why some posts receive no comments explains what reviewers need in order to help (r/EngineeringResumes, n.d.-e). The community's success stories, in which members share the versions that finally earned interviews, are worth reading for the pattern rather than for any single example (r/EngineeringResumes, n.d.-d). Once your resume is in circulation, treat it as an experiment. If a few dozen tailored applications to postings whose degree line names your field produce no phone screens, the resume is the likeliest problem and deserves revision before you send more; if you are reaching interviews but not offers, the resume is doing its job and the work lies elsewhere. And if this board helped you land a role, we would be glad to hear how, and with your permission to share the story, at [email protected], so that the next reader can see what worked.
These links come from the welcome message the r/EngineeringResumes moderators send to new members from their u/EngResMods account; the descriptions are ours, and each entry carries its citation. Several were written for software engineers, but their reasoning applies to informatics with very little translation.
Every person, group, organization, website, study, standard, and product named on this page, in APA style. The r/EngineeringResumes entries are listed under the community's name because the individual authors' usernames could not be confirmed when this page was written.