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Comment by dcminter | Hacker News Reader

> We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I').

Who is "we" here? I've always had good results with a first person CV - so far in the US, the UK, and the EU. Maybe I just get away with it by luck or circumstance, but it's clearly not a set-in-stone requirement.

> It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".

Anecdotally a friend who at that time worked at Sun Microsystems told me that his team prioritised CVs created with LaTeX over all others.

After all, if the purpose of a CV is not to "try and impress you" then what is it?

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Not using "I" on a resume is pretty much the first rule of resume writing. If you were to search for rules of resume writing, I expect that would probably appear on every article. If you've had good results with a first person CV, that's probably because your experience is strong enough that the reader forgives you for the error.

Of course you 'can' write a resume in first person. It's just not the voice that the reader expects. Similar to third person.

A resume is certainly meant to try and impress the reader, but typically we're trying to impress the reader with professional accomplishments. I'm much more impressed by someone's professional accomplishments than their choice to use LaTeX.

Since you are openly advocating for people to blindly follow this rule… can you at least explain _why_ do you think this rule makes sense and people should follow it.

When I hire, I couldn’t care less about whether the person uses I or We.

Search for "should I use first person on resume", the articles will explain a bit. One reason is brevity - we want to use as few words as possible.

The other is redundancy - if we use "I", chances are almost every sentence will begin with "I". I did this, I did that.

I'm caught between thinking you'd have to be a loon to make hiring decisions on this basis, and wanting to punish the fewer than 10% of people in my inbox that actually follow this advice for having no critical thinking skills of their own.

If you're saying less than 10% of the resumes you get are written in implied first person, I find that incredibly hard to believe. I work with easily 1000 clients a year (most in tech), and the 'before' resumes sent to me by clients are at least 95%+ in implied first person.

Going to walk back my 10% here, that's just the number that don't use 'I' somewhere in their CV. There are many that just do it in an intro or elsewhere, but list projects or contributions in implied first person. Some are an ungodly amalgamation of both (I know my LinkedIn profile certainly is, but that was created under duress). I am fine with either, I just don't understand the idea that a recruiter is going to clutch their pearls at this. Anyway, my original question was genuine, I'd be fascinated to see some controlled study into this, which I understand would be hard to engineer.

I still fail to see the value in filtering out candidates by whether they know this rule that still nobody has given any actual arguments for.

"If you Google this string, you'll find the arguments" is a logical fallacy. You are claiming that there are arguments for why this rule is true, but not providing any. If anything, the only thing this statement proofs is that you are not able to explain why doing this is even a good idea.

And FWIW, I actually google this and none of the first 5 results actually explained why this rule makes sense. They were all posts of the form "20 rules to blindly follow when writing a resumee".

Where do you see anyone suggesting that we actually "filter out" candidates because they use "I"? Nowhere in this thread have I suggested that in any way.

In other parts of this thread, I've explained why we don't use I. Let me gather them for you.

1 - Redundancy. Imagine a list of bullets that start with the word "I".

- I wrote a playbook for product implementations.

- I managed the project...

- I oversaw a team that...

Hopefully by now you see this wouldn't be a fun read.

2 - Necessity - The resume is about you, not others, so we don't need to say that you (I) did the things on the resume. That is understood, and why 'implied' first person fulfills our needs while also reducing the content. If I ask you what you did today, you can just say "Watched TV, mowed the lawn, ..." - you don't need to say "I watched TV, and then I mowed the lawn."

I hope this helps, and maybe we can put this to bed.

If they don't filter it out... why should anyone care? Kinda feels like you sent off for a "become a resume writer in 24 hours" kit and segued from there into being an internet bore who thinks he's a brand. Literally all your comments on HN are "RESUME WRITER HERE!" as if that's anything other than a recruiter who found an easier scam. I've no doubt there's money in it, but realistically you could just be the identity function and still place almost all your customers.

You've decided to get personal. Will top candidates be filtered out based on some issues related to breaking resume norms? Probably not. Bill Gates could write a resume on a napkin in ketchup and get an interview.

It mainly makes a difference for candidates in more competitive situations - give a recruiter two resumes with somewhat parallel experience, and the better resume (based on writing style, obeying stylistic norms, etc.) is probably more likely to get the interview.

As for a "scam", my results are hard to argue with, and most clients seem to think the investment was a good one. Many of my clients come to me after having failed to get interviews for their dream jobs, and after working with me their fortunes often change. Many of my clients approach me trying to get jobs at places like FAANG companies, while many others just are looking to work at places most people have never heard of.

Would you like to be done now? We both have better things to do.

Well that's just rude.

A not-very-thorough search for CV and Resumé writing and skimming through the results and I don't find anyone mentioning the importance of avoiding the first person.

That actually surprises me, because while I don't think it's good advice I did think it was common.

I did a quick search, and the results surprised me too. After reading a couple of the articles, I was less surprised, because they weren't good. Try a search for "should I use first person on resume" (no quotes). That search turned up more of what I expected.

The #1 result in my "rules for resume writing" search did mention first person.

I agree that they weren't particularly good pieces of advice. However I think it gives the lie to your assumption that this is a given.

Part of me thinks that the rule is so well-known that the writers didn't both to include it. Like "don't use a handwritten resume" isn't something we need to tell readers.

I could be wrong about that, but the data doesn't lie. I've read far more resumes than the average human being - 20 years in recruiting, 7 years as a resume writer, thousands of writing clients - and definitely <10% of the resumes I receive from clients include the word "I" anywhere at all.

If it's not a given, I guess it would be one heckuva coincidence that 90%+ of the tens of thousands of resumes I've seen all don't use "I".

Again, "unusual" and "bad" are not the same thing.

You've laid it down as the prime consideration for writing a CV and given no evidence that it's even important! You may be right, but you haven't shown that you're right even anecdotally. Strongly held beliefs are fine, but they're not evidence.

I don't think I used "bad" anywhere, but it's something we're generally told not to do. If you Google that specific question about first person, you will likely get the answer "don't do that". (I ran a few searches like this myself already). "The prime consideration" is a bit strong.

Can you be successful with a first person resume? Yes. You can also be success with a third person resume, or a resume that is web-based and includes only a list of links to your code repos.

My evidence is from reading resumes every day of my life for 20 years. Tens of thousands from people all over the world. You can call that anecdotal.

The thing is there are no "official" rules for resumes like there would be for haiku or sonnet. It's not that kind of writing, but there are norms.

As another example of a norm, an experience section is written in reverse chronological order (most recent experience first). Have I ever seen someone write it another way? Of course. But that is also incredibly uncommon.

We typically put contact info at the top. Can you put it on the bottom? Maybe even on the last page? Sure. But that would be unusual, and the reader may be inclined to thinking that you don't know how to write a resume.

I think I've used up all my energy in talking about resumes today, and I need to go write some resumes. Enjoy your day.

Ok, you didn't say it was bad, that was my inference and evidently my mistake.

But if it's just common, well, it's an odd piece of advice for someone who has literally formatted their CV as a programming language's reference document!

Edit: Oh, and thanks for your patience and for engaging.

My apologies for taxing your energy supplies and more power to your elbow in crafting supplications ;)

What’s the basis for this advice? Have you tested A/B tested it with your clients?

In fairness, A/B testing this approach would be ethically very iffy, particularly if they believe it makes a difference!

Nope. The results my clients get with my resumes are enough proof for me.

Before sending off my CV I always spin around three times and say a prayer to Russel's Teapot. The results I get with this practice are enough proof for me.

Ok, it's not an extraordinary stretch to imagine that your form might help, but all you've actually demonstrated is that it's not catastrophically damaging!

But you're sure that not using the first person is a big component of that?

We may have some kind of disconnect. The most common resume is written in "implied first person", and not "first person", so the "I" in most lines is implied. Examples:

Developed a web app in Python that ....

Authored a playbook for...

So it's still considered "first person" by most, but the pronoun is dropped.

Can I be sure that no using "I" on resumes is a "big component" for my success? Of course I can't be 100% sure, and my ability to highlight accomplishments is probably far more important.

But I was a recruiter for 20 years, and I know that 95% of resumes I saw during my career (easily in the tens of thousands) were written in implied first person, and when you send someone a resume that continuously uses "I" it is a bit of a shock to the system (just as it would be to see third person).

I'll tell you what, let's save us both some time. Go to Google and just search "resume", and use image search. I just went through the first page of results, and I didn't see a single resume written in first person (using "I"). Not one.

I know that lots of people who sell CV advice on the internet say this, I just find it such a bafflingly trivial piece of advice that it's strange to have strong feelings about it. Most CVs aren't written like this and I don't find myself marking them down for writing like a normal person. Maybe this is a US thing (although I have lots of US people's CVs to look at) but the idea that anyone would be shocked at seeing "I" in a CV is just nuts, and honestly, if someone filters on minutiae like that you wouldn't really want to work for them anyway.

I've written for at least a thousand international clients, hundreds in the UK, and this doesn't seem to be a US thing based on the resumes/CVs I see.

I'm not saying people are filtering on seeing "I", but they would be surprised in the same way they would be by seeing third person "Thom is a CTO with..." on a CV.

I have no agenda here. I'm just telling you the facts from someone who has probably read far more resumes than most others. You don't need to accept my expertise. Again, run a google image search on resumes, tell me how many you see with the word 'I'.

You clearly don't value my experience. That's OK. I'm not some advocate for first person pronouns - it doesn't help me in any way that resumes are written in this manner. I'm just explaining to you that it's a fact.

But you're not, you're explaining that it's a commonly held opinion. I'm just intrigued what the basis for that opinion is other that 'oh, everyone says to do that'. Maybe you're not curious about literally the number one piece of advice you give in your job, but I would be.

A search on Google of the words "resume first person" (without quotes) will help, with the first 10 answers pretty much unanimously agreeing with my belief. I've explained why in other responses (mostly redundancy - "I did this, I did that" gets old.

This isn't the #1 piece of advice I give in my job. I'm a writer. I write the documents. I'm not telling them what to do.

I do offer review services, which are a small part of my business. If I get a resume with the word "I" for a review, I will tell them what I've told you.

You seem intent on belittling what I do, as if my job is to walk around telling people "don't use I".

You're the one that led with that! If I were a professional internet comment writer, I'd have told you how obnoxious that was, but alas, I am merely an amateur.

I've heard both equally strongly. That 'I' is a big no no, and not using 'I' is a sign of the fact that you didn't actually contribute anything and you're riding on the coattails of your team as the 'useless group project member'.

You can write about accomplishments without using the word I. The I is implied.

Wrote an iOS game that earned $10M in revenue and had 50K downloads.

There is no I there, and I don't think you'd argue that this person contributed.

In the context of how most of us on HN work on teams it's a lot harder to talk about professional accomplishments that way.

If you were at iPhone game co on a team and had "wrote an iOS game that earned $10m in revenue an had 50k downloads" there are absolutely people out there that read that as a team accomplishment that's suspicious that you didn't use 'I' to describe what you actually did.

I was trying to be simple and now we've reached the pedantic stage.

If it was a team effort, we may use "Contributed to development of an iOS game that earned $10M in revenue.".

If it was an individual effort, the bullet I wrote earlier could included a term to clarify that, like "Independently...".

As for 'us on HN', about 100 HN users hire me every year. I even have a discount code for HN users on my HN page here (I got 3 HN orders in the past two days, probably from people reading this thread). I'm familiar with how to write accomplishments on resumes, for HN users and others.

I said at the beginning that there's two camps who equally hold opposite beliefs. Just because you've made a career catering to one camp doesn't mean the other camp isn't out there.

I've been in the resume game in one way or another for 20+ years, have published countless articles about resumes on various websites, and written for thousands of clients from all over the world. I've never witnessed anything resembling "the other camp". I've never had a client question the "I" advice - not once.

You can say it exists, but it would be nearly impossible for me to spend an entire career in this field and not ever come across it.

Your clients by definition don't have strong feelings on the format for a resume and accept what you tell them.

You writing countless articles about what you think doesn't preclude the idea that people out there think differently.

Meanwhile I've personally seen it in hiring committees in every job I've worked for about 15 years now. I actively shut down that line of thinking in said committees (from both directions), and it's not difficult to do because you get a group of five people or so together in a committee and that's normally enough for there to be differing opinions on the matter. "Look, even in this small group, of people we've hired and trust to make good hiring decisions, there's mutually exclusive ideas on what you're 'supposed to do'. So obviously we throw out both ideas and accept whatever in this case since it's completely orthogonal".

I personally take your approach since it's around 75%/25%, and the numbers work in favor, but there's absolutely the other camp out there.

You're making some assumptions about people you know nothing about. Some of my clients do have strong feelings on various resume topics, but they know I'm good at what I do and want my opinion. They don't always agree or accept what I tell them.

I'm really not sure what you're talking about with hiring committees, but if you're saying that some people are eliminating candidates because they did or didn't use personal pronouns, I think that's well beyond the scope of what I've been saying. I'm not suggesting applicants who use "I" should be eliminated from contention.

To echo that, it’s not that the resume authoring doesn’t matter, but saying you made it in LaTeX is better said in the cover letter where you can highlight how that’s relevant to the role or why you did so.

Most resumes are processed and chopped up by ancient applicant tracking systems, so you sometimes have to stick to the facts in a resume with a plain layout. These ATS systems rank resumes by relevance, generally based on job ad keyword matching and matching against some synonyms not mentioned in the ad.

I’ve had early success with a less traditional resume layout but I know I was picked due to relevant experience even then. Experience, relevance and luck/perseverance are probably the three keys to landing a job quickly.

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