It's time to blow up the resume

"The resume is designed to tell us where someone has been-not what they can actually do. It shows what the last person who hired you needed done in their company that they thought you could handle. It looks backward when the world of work we live in today demands that we look forward. It inflates titles, overvalues brand-name employers, and reduces people to keywords designed to sneak past applicant tracking systems."

"We're in a labor market that is more dynamic-and more inequitable-than ever. The resume does nothing to address that. It privileges polish over abilities. It amplifies bias through names, schools, and companies that often serve as proxies for race, gender, age, and class. It fails miserably at consistency-one candidate's resume looks like a design portfolio, another's like a plain-text list-and leaves parsing software to guess what "counts." No wonder amazing candidates fall through the cracks."

Resumes originated centuries ago and still chiefly list employers, education, and brief accomplishments. Resumes emphasize past roles and titles rather than demonstrable abilities and forward-looking potential. Resumes incentivize gaming through keyword optimization and inflate brand-name employers and titles. Resumes are easy and entrenched in hiring systems, so they persist despite flaws. Resumes amplify bias via names, schools, and companies that correlate with race, gender, age, and class. Resumes lack consistent structure, which frustrates parsing software and leads to qualified candidates being overlooked. A better standard must capture actual skills, unique extras, and be structured for fair, consistent evaluation.

Read at Fast Company