If Resumes are Dead, What Takes Their Place?

The UK advertising creative, Rob Mayhew, recently posted a charming-yet-poignantly satirical short about the grim realities of landing a full-time job.

Basically, one should expect endless rounds of interviews, unpaid take-home tasks and endless hoop-jumping that will take literal months, with no promise that you’ll land the job in the end. That is, if the recruiter’s AI algorithm hasn’t already 86’d you on Day One. Mayhew’s visible anxiety captures it well.

And it’s not just advertising. Social media is awash with people talking about how they applied for hundreds of jobs and only got one or two interviews, many of them just turning out to be ghost jobs in the end, and other tales of woe.

Of course, you’re sympathetic. Your team probably has a rigorous interview process yourself. You’ve been there. You know the kind of person you need has a complex skill set that can’t be measured through a resume and an interview or two. Hiring the wrong one is profit-or-loss for your team, so you don’t have the luxury of NOT being rigorous.

Fine. The system isn’t going to soften. The question is what to do about it.

The first step is accepting reality. Your grandpa’s old-timey advice still rings true: “A job that’s  easy to get is not worth having.” Suck it up, Buttercup.

The second step is best articulated through a story our friend Rory recently told us, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy UK.

Whenever its founder, David Ogilvy, promoted someone to head of an office, he sent them a Russian matryoshka doll. The new manager would open it, find a smaller doll inside, open that, find another, and keep going until they reached the smallest doll at the center. Inside was a note that said: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” 

The whole resume industry is built to help candidates look correctly sized. The right keywords. The right gaps explained. The right shape for the role. Everyone optimizing to be the doll that fits.

Ogilvy was not hiring dolls that fit. He was hiring people his managers found slightly alarming. People who were too much for the role on paper. 

This is the part the resume can’t help us with. There is no field for larger than life

So our advice is to STOP doing what everybody else does and stop trying to fit. 

Work on something that matters to you. 

Find your mission. Find something worth doing. Find a problem worth solving. Build the thing. 

The more you try to solve it, the more you will learn. And the more you learn, the more you will start meeting other people who share your interests and problem areas. Some of them will be hiring. None of them will ask for your resume.

It’s not so much “Do what you love, the money will follow” (which btw is terrible advice, according to the wise Scott Galloway).

It’s more, “do what makes you bigger, the giants will find you.”