{"id":97,"date":"2010-07-24T12:43:27","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T12:43:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/2010\/07\/24\/your-third-person-resume-creeps-me-out\/"},"modified":"2012-08-18T16:54:45","modified_gmt":"2012-08-18T16:54:45","slug":"your-third-person-resume-creeps-me-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/your-third-person-resume-creeps-me-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Third-person Resume Creeps Me Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I apologize, I know that sounds pretty harsh, but it\u2019s true, there is something creepy about third-person resumes, and lately I\u2019ve gotten a run of them. They say things like \u201cRay is a talented designer who has built three companies\u201d or \u201cMr. Johnson has twenty years of experience as a widget maker.\u201d You know, like someone was writing an article about them for a magazine, only it\u2019s not a magazine, and it\u2019s not an article or a brochure or anything like that\u2026 it\u2019s a danged resume. And I know that you wrote it yourself, Ray and Mr. Johnson, or at least oversaw the process of it, so when it\u2019s written in the third person, it is just plain creepy, like crazy talk.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure that folks who do this are thinking that it sounds business-like, and that it\u2019s a good idea, so maybe a quick (or not-so-quick) review of the three different writing perspectives, or points of view, is in order:<\/p>\n

1. First person<\/strong> \u2013 This is when someone is writing from their own perspective. Most blogs are written in first person, and this one is no exception. I use the word \u201cI\u201d because I\u2019m talking about me, from my head, and I want you to know it. When the speaker uses the words \u201cI\u201d and \u201cwe,\u201d then it\u2019s first person.<\/p>\n

2. Second person<\/strong> \u2013 The key that something is written in the second person is the word \u201cyou.\u201d Advertisers use it a lot in things like \u201cYou can\u2019t get to sleep at night, so you should take this sleeping pill,\u201d and you\u2019ll occasionally find it in literature or movie narratives. I often switch into second person in my writing, just as I do when I’m speaking \u2013 sometimes I\u2019m talking about me, and sometimes I\u2019m talking as if I were you.<\/p>\n

3. Third person<\/strong> \u2013 This is the most impersonal of the points of view. It’s how news stories are written, from the point of an observer, so you will see names, and the words \u201che,\u201d \u201cshe\u201d and \u201cthey.\u201d It\u2019s the most common way of writing, where the writer is separate from whoever they’re writing about.<\/p>\n

That’s why it\u2019s totally illogical to use the third person to write about yourself… because you are not separate from the story on your resume. Third person might be the way to write press releases or when you\u2019re writing something up that will be included in a brochure or website, but it never works for a resume. Never. When you use third person in a resume, you end up sounding pretentious, overly impersonal and\/or clueless. Not good.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to sound mean about it or make anyone cower in shame here. It\u2019s confusing to write a resume, because it\u2019s like a whole different language and structure. It\u2019s business-like, but it is also personal. Sentences are truncated and often don\u2019t have a subject. \u201cTasked with creating a new company identity\u201d works as a complete sentence in resume-speak, while if you said it in person, people would be confused. Thoughts are often pulled out into bullets. It\u2019s not easy, and it\u2019s not like any other kind of writing, and there are a million opinions about the “right way” to do it.<\/p>\n

The perspective of the person who’s reading it is what you need to focus on, and they know that your resume is a document created by you (even if you had someone else do it) to recap and describe your background and talents. It’s you telling your story, and they trust that it is a personal representation of your background, and that it is submitted by you. And all of that means that if it sounds like it was written by someone else, it’s just plain weird. \u201cMs. Gupta has worked for ten years in marketing\u201d might work for a press release, but on a resume, it\u2019s just kinda creepy.<\/p>\n

Third person is also the complete opposite of how resumes work best. You want your resume to present you as a real person, and to create at least a flavor of personality and connectedness with the reader. As a recruiter, I want your resume to show me who you are, to be a personal statement of what you\u2019ve done and what you can do, and to give me some sense of what you want to do. To do that, you have to write it from your heart, which means you have to write it from you. It just won’t work as if it is written by someone else.<\/p>\n

So if your resume is written in the third person, I’m sorry if I made you feel bad, but please go fix it. We already know it\u2019s from you, and it\u2019s just too weird when it reads like it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I apologize, I know that sounds pretty harsh, but it\u2019s true, there is something creepy about third-person resumes, and lately I\u2019ve gotten a run of them. They say things like \u201cRay is a talented designer who has built three companies\u201d or \u201cMr. Johnson has twenty years of experience as a widget maker.\u201d You know, like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all-articles","category-resume-rants-and-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1134,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/1134"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thejobsearchguru.com\/notesfrom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}