Sortable Is Not Legible

I work on a project that is attempting to reimagine the resume. The goal is to make people more holistically legible. With that you can make better hiring decisions and connect in new ways beyond jobs.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we document who we are and what we do. How do we make it small enough to understand at a glance but long enough to have value?

There is a common practice in resumes and professional profiles to list out a bunch of skills.

A few problems emerge when you dive into these. It’s hard to classify some skills. Some people will call it one thing and others will call it another. Sometimes there’s an acronym and sometimes a long phrase. Skills are being created all the time.

These problems are solvable through different methods of creating and managing taxonomies.

One problem persists through all this. Lists of keywords collapse and conflate meaning. They are flags that show a general direction. They are wildly imprecise in actually conveying the capabilities of an individual.

Skill lists do not create a legible profile.

The Score by C. Thi Nguyen explores how scoring systems interact with our desires and values. The book focuses on numerical scoring systems but lists of aspects are also a type of metric. They’re boolean. You either have the thing or you don’t.

Nguyen explains how metrics solve for accessibility, repeatability, and scale. But they trade away nuance, adaptability, and context.

Skill lists seem easy to understand at a glance. People can adopt them and understand how to create one for their profile. People can reuse the skills that others are using.

A side effect is that skills lists attempt to make people replaceable. It may not be intentional but this is the problem skill lists try to solve. If we can make a checklist of skills then anyone that fills the checklist could work.

Jane has Javascript, social media, and marketing. John has Javascript, social media, and marketing. They must both be good fits for the job, right?

But then what does it actually mean that I have Javascript on my profile? Do I enjoy using Javascript? How experienced am I? What have I done with Javascript? How can you trust I even have that skill?

Skill lists don’t solve this. Tack on skill ratings and tests and it’s still fuzzy at best.

There’s no easy solution. It’s a major point of Nguyen’s book but it shows up here in reality. There is a tension between surface data that’s easy to filter on and deep insightful information. Resumes and professional profiles favor the former and ignore the latter completely.

The reality is that understanding takes time. This is why people tend to hire from their networks. You’re leaning on established trust and understanding rather than trying to start from pile of keywords.

A profile that conveys more will need to capture more. There’s no shortcut. It’s slower to produce and to consume. It’s hard to filter and hard to compare.

In a way legibility is a trap. Overvaluing easy legibility leads to creating things like skill lists and profile scores. You’re trying to make it easy but end up in a place where people look the same. Now you have 1000 viable candidates to sort through.

A reimagined resume isn’t a better list. It’s a different take on understanding the person behind the document.