Here's an arms race nobody planned.
Applicants use AI to write the resume. Companies use AI to read it. The machine on one side optimizes for the machine on the other. And the person in the middle, the actual human being hired, has left the conversation.
What's the pattern?
The resume is a technology. It solved a specific problem: a stranger needs to evaluate another stranger quickly, at a distance, without seeing their work. Leonardo da Vinci wrote what's often called the first one in the 1480s, a letter to the Duke of Milan listing what he could build.
For most of history you didn't need one. You were hired by someone who'd seen you work, or by someone who knew someone who had. Apprenticeships. Guilds. Reputation in a town of a few thousand people.
The resume scaled hiring past that. And then it became the thing itself: a performance of a career rather than a record of one. Keywords. Formats. The ritual of the objective statement nobody reads.
AI finishes it off, because a document any machine can write and any machine can read carries no signal. And when a signal dies, hiring goes back to the thing that always worked. Show me.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
Ask for the thing, not the description. A piece of work, a decision they made, a problem they solved. Portfolios for everyone, not just designers.
Talk to a human early. The screening call used to be step four. Make it step one. AI made the top of the funnel worthless; the fix is to put the person back at the top.
And rebuild reputation networks on purpose. The referral from someone who's seen the work is the oldest hiring signal there is, and the one AI can't fake. Pay attention to it again.
The resume was a workaround for not knowing anyone. Now the workaround is broken. The answer is to know people again.
When did you last hire someone because of something they made, not something they wrote?
Related: Should you hire for skills or for curiosity?
- Leonardo da Vinci, letter to Ludovico Sforza, c. 1482, often cited as the first resume.
More like this on LinkedIn. Follow @samradofficial
