My esteemed coaches at Employment Ontario suggest that resumes be written thusly:
Is it indeed common to refer to oneself in the third person vernacular nowadays on resumes? I’ve been doing this with zero nibbles. Perhaps I’ve been mislead? Comments? Suggestions?
If I saw a resume like that, it would definitely stand out as weird. Not weird enough to really affect my opinion of you, but - still weird.
That is very strange IMHO and not in a good way.
Third person is not a tense.
Thanks very much for your insightful assistance. :rolleyes:
Not as good as a resume written in 4th person.
BTW the word you want is “misled”.
I do my best.
I should have been in a position to offer something more insightful, as I went on some job-seeking courses only like fifteen months ago, but it seems to have leaked right back out through my ears. Let’s see what I can manage:
IIRC you don’t need to keep dropping your name in all the time, as it should be right there in large letters at the top of the resume, where the reviewer can easily refer to it. Nor do you need to say “I have…” either, as the reviewer also knows that you are talking about yourself, not Joe Soap from Lower Bumfuck.
Resumes come in two basic flavours - those that match your job experience to what you’re going after, and those that match your qualifications and personality to the same.
In the former case, if you’re going after a widget-manufacturing job then you give details of successful widget manufacturing in your career, from the most recent up to the oldest; so you talk about how you successfully managed a team of fifteen widget fabricators on the Buggins contract last year, after five years as a senior widget fabricator yourself, and so on back to being a widget-fabricator’s mate back in 1983, and finally your various school diplomas, hobbies and interests.
If you’re making a big career shift, then you start off by talking about how your general aptitude, qualifications and interests fit you for the job in question, and you illustrate this with references to how you acquired and developed these in your widget-manufacturing career; but it’s the personal aspects, and not the less-relevant career history, that the reviewer wants to see.
Hope this helps; it may all be pitifully obvious, but I guess I owe you a PALATR opportunity after my grammatical snippiness. Also, good luck. 
Is that what happens when you use Yogg Sothoth and Cthulu as your references?
Also, quantify the shit out of everything as far as possible. State that you delivered on the Buggins contract two weeks ahead of schedule and 7.5% under budget. Show how you reduced widget manufacturing costs by 0.5 cents per unit, on a median volume of 2500 widgets per diem. And mention how you stepped in while the head widget designer was on six weeks sick leave. Employers want to know how you are going to make money for them and they want figures to back up their claim, and they want you to show how you understand your employer’s business, not just your part of it. Since your name is at the top of the resume, sentence structure can just read like:
July 2008 - present: Managed fabrication team for Buggins contract (15 senior fabricators, 10 ancillary staff), delivered two weeks ahead of schedule and 7.5% under $BUDGET budget. Introduced $PROCESS to reduce widget manufacturing costs by 0.5 cents per unit (on median volume 2500 units/day) while covering for unexpected absence of senior widget designer.
Never speak ill of a previous employer, even if they were a bunch of lying, backstabbing scuzzbuckets and the whole industry knows it. It’s like the dating thing: people figure if you diss one previous partner, you’ll diss them too as soon as their back is turned.
Footnote: Okay, the volume would need to be a couple of orders of magnitude higher before that cost saving would be worth bragging about, but you get the general idea. 
I think you should write in the first person plural when applying for a job as Queen of England, and first person singular otherwise. If I got a resume written in the third person I would keep it with the other bizarre losing resumes, like the one in which the candidate keeps misspelling his own name.
By the way, Malacandra, that was a most gracious save - nicely done!
Funny. I’ve always managed to write resumes without using any personal pronouns at all, and without typing my name anywhere than at the top of the page.
All of the third person resumes I’ve seen were for consultants. They were always longer, and more detailed than the usual resume, but they were meant for a somewhat different audience (a normal resume is meant for HR and hiring managers, a consultant resume is meant for the executives bringing the consulting team). The way I did mine, which seemed to fit with the standard, was every third paragraph had “Mr. Redwing”, while the others had “he”.
I wouldn’t use this format if I was trying to get a permanent position, unless it was with a consulting company. When I was going through a stack of resumes, the ones that use odd fonts or formats get shifted to the back of the pile (I’ll read em only if I can’t find enough people in the normal stuff).
(FTR I’m in IT, so business consultants may use different rules)
I work in IT, and I’ve done a lot of hiring and working with consultants, and I’ve never seen a third-person resume. I guess if you’re looking at it from the perspective that the consulting company is presenting the information rather than the individual, third person makes some sort of sense. But I would still see it as anomalous and a little odd.
On a resume from an individual? Definitely a little on the weird side. I wouldn’t count them out because of that, but they’d go to the bottom of the “maybe” pile if they otherwise met the qualifications.
You have to remember a resume is NOT about getting a job, very few jobs are gotten because of a resume.
A resume is a key, it’s the key to getting a door open in that company
Think of the H/R director as a person who is fumbling around in her purse or his pocket and that is full of keys. If you’re key stands out, whether or not it fits, it’s gonna get noticed.
I have interviewed people with nice resume and are HORRIBLE at interviews. It seems to me these people had others write their resumes, but they almost surely still would’ve gotten the interview with a worse resume and would’ve been better off focusing their time on interviewing skills.
If you like your resume, try it and see if you get callbacks. Granted if you really need work perhaps it’s not the best time to experiment but you could always try applying to jobs that you don’t want and seeing what happens.
Remember resume’s get you noticed INTERVIEWS get you hired.
I teach resume writing (among other things) and have done a lot of research on the subject. I have never seen anything like that. They are probably telling you that because they want you to avoid first-person pronouns. When writing a resume, you should generally avoid saying “I am proficient in Avid Cut Pro” and instead just write “Proficient in Avid Cut Pro.” But third person? That’s just funny, and people would laugh, and that’s not the reaction you’re going for.
All of the CVs that I get via employment consultants are written in the third person.
We think it sounds like someone else is writing Leaffan’s resume, like Leaffan’s mom, or a paid resume writer. We think Leaffan should talk about him/herself in positive ways that might give us the impression that Leaffan will not be bringing anyone else to the interview.
But we are funny that way.
Getting noticed is not always good. If you put your resume on flowery pink stationery and spray it with perfume, you’ll get noticed (read: laughed at).
HR people are generally winnowing through lots of resumes, looking for reasons to disqualify people. Being perceived as creepy or weird is one very easy way of doing so.
Exactly. It’s possible to write without any pronouns like in Malacandras’s example, and I was taught that it’s proper to do so.