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Comment by dcminter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 ;)

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