7 ms·

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 appea

by fecak 5y ago

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.

volta83 5y ago
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.
- fecak 5y ago
  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.
  - thom 5y ago
    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.
    - fecak 5y ago
      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.
      - thom 5y ago
        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.
        volta83 5y ago
        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".
        fecak 5y ago
        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.
lstamour 5y ago
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.
dcminter 5y ago
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.
- fecak 5y ago
  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.
  - dcminter 5y ago
    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.
    - fecak 5y ago
      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".
      - dcminter 5y ago
        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.
thom 5y ago
What’s the basis for this advice? Have you tested A/B tested it with your clients?
- dcminter 5y ago
  In fairness, A/B testing this approach would be ethically very iffy, particularly if they believe it makes a difference!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- fecak 5y ago
  Nope. The results my clients get with my resumes are enough proof for me.
  - thom 5y ago
    But you're sure that not using the first person is a big component of that?
    - fecak 5y ago
      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.
monocasa 5y ago
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'.
- fecak 5y ago
  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.
  - monocasa 5y ago
    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.
    - fecak 5y ago
      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.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        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.

by fecak 5y ago

volta83 5y ago

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.

fecak 5y ago
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.
- thom 5y ago
  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.
  - fecak 5y ago
    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.
    - thom 5y ago
      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.
      - volta83 5y ago
        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".
        fecak 5y ago
        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.

lstamour 5y ago

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.

dcminter 5y ago

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.

fecak 5y ago
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.
- dcminter 5y ago
  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.
  - fecak 5y ago
    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".
    - dcminter 5y ago
      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.

thom 5y ago

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

dcminter 5y ago
In fairness, A/B testing this approach would be ethically very iffy, particularly if they believe it makes a difference!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
fecak 5y ago
Nope. The results my clients get with my resumes are enough proof for me.
- thom 5y ago
  But you're sure that not using the first person is a big component of that?
  - fecak 5y ago
    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.

monocasa 5y ago

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'.

fecak 5y ago
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.
- monocasa 5y ago
  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.
  - fecak 5y ago
    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.
    - monocasa 5y ago
      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.