Resumes focus on the wrong thing

Resumes are universally written as a list of timespans. We list out the time we spent at this and that company. We describe the things we did there. Maybe we list some keywords for ATS systems to pick up. If we had a significant deliverable or outcome it’ll get a nice little bullet point.

I’ve looked at hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes and they are all boring. Mine is boring. Yours is boring.

There are some things they can tell us about a person, though.

I’ve landed interviews partly because of the paper I printed my resume on. Some years ago when I still had to drive around and hand out resumes I opted for higher quality paper that cost a little more. I’ve had multiple interviews start with a comment on the quality of the paper.

Learning from this, a big thing I look for in a resume is whether the person has attention to detail. Is this well formatted? Are there typos? Is it consistent and aesthetically pleasing?

These come from the design of the document itself and not the content. It’s also a problem largely solved by ample resume templates and AI generators. Resume tools will now rewrite a beautiful resume for every job you apply to. It makes the document itself largely useless.

The utility is slipping away. I can no longer tell if you opt for the nice paper or go for the cheap and thin stuff.

A career is filled with moments that define a change in direction. These could be a sudden realization, a change of worldview, or shift in priorities. There’s a story behind that change. Why did you do that? What did the experience teach you? Why did you leave this job?

It’s absurd that we have to wait until the interview to dig into the interesting points in a career. Yet, resumes are not designed to deliver this kind of information.

Instead, questions like these require context and narration to answer. A resume is designed to be something we can skim to filter people out. It’s an imprecise tool at best.

Arguably, if you maintain a history of publication it can capture these stories. But then, are we going to expect everyone to output content as a type of resume? It seems like a lot to ask. Yet, it feels like more and more knowledge work is moving this way. There’s this latent expectation to maintain a personal brand.

As I write this I wonder about creating a resume with a different kind of framing. What would it look like and how would people react to it? I imagine in the world of ATS auto-filtering, you’d be invariably rejected without a human ever seeing it. So this is mostly a thought experiment unless the system shifts to support it

In my current role we built a more narrative professional profile. It’s a step in this direction but still largely leans on traditional resume concepts. It bothers me.

There’s this underlying issue that the document still needs to serve as a filtering tool. The filters being uses are very shallow. They’re keywords and timeframes. But people aren’t checklists like this and transferable skills are very real. Most filters are wishful thinking.

When I interview someone, I’m really trying to understand their mindset. No document I’ve ever seen accurately captures this. I don’t really know how you’d filter on it.

A post-resume artifact will find a way to solve this problem. It’ll avoid keyword filtering as a core concept. It’ll help you more deeply understand the person behind the document.