It’s time to say our final “goodbye” to the résumé. It served us well, but it has expired and must be sent to its final resting place in The Great Document Template Pile beyond.
There’s no shame in feeling grief over this. Perhaps you’re a frustrated job seeker. You hired a résumé writer or you ran your résumé through a robot service countless times like I did in business school. Then you submitted that résumé to thousands of companies only to be rejected everywhere you applied. You may have mixed feelings reading this eulogy. The passing of a friend who always tried but ultimately failed to help you is a unique grief.
You may be a hiring manager who loves the résumé’s structured data format that makes it easy to quickly issue your Caesar's thumb vote on another person’s future path within seconds. You may start your grief journey with denial. That’s natural. Eventually, you’ll reach acceptance as I have.
The crash of a ladder
If you are neither of the above and you still doubt, look around. You can see the résumé’s lifeless body in this statistic that you’ve likely come across many times: 57% of Gen Z want to be influencers. Yes, many who seek this path may wrongly assume that the work is easier than holding down a 9-to-5 weekday job. Meanwhile, older workers clutch their pearls, fearing the younger generation has descended completely into utter frivolity, overtaken by the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year: brain rot. (If you’re among the pearl-clutching class, take comfort, we’ve come down from 86% of young people wanting to be influencers back in 2019.) Look more closely, however, and you’ll see the coldly rational conclusion young people are making.
The career ladder came crashing down, but the rise of more powerful digital tools means we can carve paths that take us to new places old ladders couldn't go.
Young people can see that introductory jobs are increasingly difficult to find and leverage into better paying positions. They also know this is a problem likely to be made worse by the collection of technologies being lumped under the banner “AI”. This means, one of the few paths to gaining any work experience at all is making your own job where you can show what you can uniquely offer not just to a prospective employer, but to the world. The career ladder came crashing down, but the rise of more powerful digital tools means we can carve paths that take us to new places old ladders couldn't go.
A cry from the crowd
You may hold up LinkedIn as evidence that the résumé is alive and well with its over 1 billion users worldwide. LinkedIn is a powerful platform with reams of data centered around people’s work history and career aspirations. That data isn’t just high in volume. It’s that sweet, sweet digital gold investors love: It’s structured data. Everyone on LinkedIn has to enter information in a finite set of labeled boxes, and many of those boxes correspond to the boxes found on the standard résumé, of course. You have to give a company the credit it’s due for taking the world’s résumés and turning them into one, big structured dataset.
You can take each human on the site and lay them out into a spreadsheet row. No, not a full spreadsheet. You, the LinkedIn user, represent one row of data among billions of rows across hundreds if not thousands of columns. That’s great for LinkedIn in that it can charge companies a lot of money for access to that data. But it’s bad for applicants because it flattens them into a set of data cells that look, walk, and talk the same as every other group of cells in the sheet. Yes, you probably have a great profile pic and one of the roughly 11 million LinkedIn Creator accounts with incredible content, but how unique can you be when you’re working within the same structure as everyone else? Constraints are essential for creativity, but one of the most wonderful parts of creative work is designing those very constraints and discovering new ones over time.
Then there’s the question of how successful job seekers are on LinkedIn. Here’s where some data can help us out. According to data available from Hootsuite, 6 people are hired every minute through LinkedIn, which sounds okay on its face. People are getting hired using a structured data résumé format. See? The résumé is alive and well – long may it live!
Hold on, let’s crunch a few more numbers. The 6 people hired per minute in 2024 is down from 8 people per minute in 2023. And those six people hired every minute are the result of 140 job applications submitted every second – or 8,400 applications every minute. So, 6 people get hired per 8,400 applications. That’s, um, how do you say … not great. If I am a job seeker, I’m standing over my résumé’s lifeless body with defibrillator pads wondering if one more hit amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.
Welcome to The Great Robot Job War – where job applicant robots and recruiter robots duke it out … and no one wins.
What about recruiters? They must love LinkedIn for putting the world’s talent in one place and for all of the structured data it provides, right? Based on reporting from The Wall Street Journal in September, recruiters are getting overwhelmed as job seekers use robots to create and send their résumés faster than they ever could manually. In an attempt to defend against the onslaught, recruiters are using their own robots to review and filter out resumes with the cream, ideally, rising to the top. Unfortunately, the cream appears to be evaporating, leaving recruiters and job seekers empty handed. Welcome to The Great Robot Job War – where job applicant robots and recruiter robots duke it out … and no one wins.
The secret ingredient
During my daily morning read, I came across this opinion piece in The New York Times headlined, “Human Interaction is Now a Luxury Good”. Kudos to the headline writer, because they stopped me in my tracks.
The author, Jessica Grose (who has an amazing beat), writes: “I wondered if having to interact with … a malfunctioning robot that keeps asking us if we’re human is making many of us feel like our institutions don’t care about us at all.”
I offer a build on Jessica’s wondering. I wonder if it’s not our institutions we seek care from – it’s each other. The stats regarding the percentage of people who find jobs through personal networking are muddled. My own personal experience is the best data I have. Nearly every job I have ever had has been through knowing someone who believed in my potential and gave me a shot. I applied cold to one job and got it, but it didn’t last very long. I ended up leaving because a mentor called me and let me know about a job that aligned more to my interests. It was a job I begged the universe for years ago as a high school student dreaming of a career in media: working for the award-winning journalist, Gwen Ifill.
We -- not our resumés or robots -- are the secret ingredient. We always have been.
The fact of the matter is people find jobs in a variety of ways while deploying a number of different strategies. It’s not just about who you know, what you know, whether you have a LinkedIn Creator account or no LinkedIn account at all. Finding a job – an opportunity to deliver value to the world – is about people. We -- not our resumés or robots -- are the secret ingredient. We always have been.
Goodbye, resumé. Hello, canvas.
This is why I am writing this eulogy for the résumé. It is a valuable document that has served us well since, as the story goes, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote a letter advertising his skills to the Duke of Milan in 1482, but it is insufficient now. Besides, Da Vinci’s format was nowhere near as rigid as the format we use today. So, that should tell us something.
As exponentially greater compute power and myriad digital tools proliferate with their associated costs and benefits – so too can our creativity in meeting and getting to know real people. Human interaction cannot and should not be a luxury good – and that is something over which each of us has far more control than we might think or be led to believe. So, let the robots fight over the scraps of our résumés while we all sit down with one another over a drink or a meal and discuss our talents, what we’d like to create, which problems we’d like to solve and how we might get to work.
If you’re not having fun building a record of what you’ve learned and achieved, then you’re probably writing a résumé. If that feels like picking over a corpse, that’s because you are.
In between those coffees and meals together, remember that the work of recording your achievements should be a celebration that you relish, not a chore you dread. You are much more than a series of titles, dates, locations and dry, robotic phrases that ultimately fail to capture the blood, sweat, and tears that went into every day, week, month, and year you spent working towards goals and achieving new levels of personal growth. If you’re not having fun building a record of what you’ve learned and achieved, then you’re probably writing a résumé. If that feels like picking over a corpse, that’s because you are.
So, you can stop that now. Instead, consider building something entirely new with other people – ideally a new tool that not only captures how you’ve grown but one that serves your growth goals. In my case, I called up some friends over at Retrospect Studios to help me build this site and a slew of fresh collateral. I used LinkedIn to run a survey among my contacts, inviting them to help me learn more about me as a professional. That’s right, LinkedIn is actually really great to help you gather your own data to go build your own unique bonfire others can gather around. Now, I’m sharing this lovely, newly-designed tool with friends, hoping it’s interesting, useful, or inspiring for them and anyone else interested in getting to know me. It’s not a résumé, it’s a canvas – and one I am very excited to start painting on in my own, unique way.
So, thank you, résumé. You served many of us well, and your memory will live on – if not with us then most certainly with our robots.
Copyright notice: No part of this content may be used to train any model of any kind in any way without the author's express permission.
