The Resume Is Dead
Hiring in the Future of Work
Somewhere between the fax machine and the neural net, between your third “quick intro call” and that one recruiter who still ghosts you despite saying “we’ll be in touch soon,” the Resume died.
There was no funeral. No farewell toast over lukewarm conference room coffee. Just a quiet deletion from a shared Google drive, overwritten by an AI-generated PDF with proper bullet spacing and five new synonyms for “collaborated.”
AI has pounded the final nail in the coffin of the resume as an employment vehicle. And though the obituary will never run in Forbes, those of us on the hiring side (particularly those of us who’ve built companies from nothing, scraped meaning from entropy) know it’s true.
We’ve all seen it. The document that sings and dances, that tells of excellence and ownership and cross-functional synergy. And then the reality: a person utterly unable to improvise, adapt, or read the room.
Why? Because the system we built was never designed to find leaders. It was designed to filter noise. And now, that filter is clogged. With keywords. With cottage-industry coaching. With bots whispering how to pass interviews like they're riddles guarding a cave.
Bureaucracy as Theater
Let’s be honest: the hiring process today is a farce. A dystopian stage play in five acts:
Algorithmic Sorting – where resumes are fed into machines that understand neither nuance nor ambition.
Initial Resume Screen – often outsourced, conducted by someone who doesn’t know the work, only the checklist.
Behavioral Interview – where applicants are coached to tell war stories in the STAR format, regardless of whether the war ever happened.
Take-Home Test – unpaid labor, of course, with no feedback.
Ghosting – the quiet end, where nothing is said and no one is accountable.
It’s a system so bloated, it now selects not for capability but for conformity. Not for courage but for compliance.
Meanwhile, the problems grow stranger, thornier, less suited to those who’ve been filtered through a static lens.
We need people who can navigate chaos. Who can spot patterns in noise. Who can walk into a mess and not ask for a map.
Where the Work Actually Happens
Here’s the secret, whispered among founders, passed along like samizdat between burned-out executives at midnight meetings in the back of a Denny’s: the real work doesn’t happen in job descriptions. It doesn’t happen in onboarding packets or “weeks of shadowing.”
It happens in conversations, in late nights and early mornings, in shared failure and improbable recoveries. It happens in the moments when something breaks and there’s no one else around.
You find your people not by reading their achievements. You find them by watching them move.
So what do I, as a multi-founder, want to see instead?
Show up. Uninvited, if you have to. Find where the work is happening and insert yourself. Even if you’re awkward (especially if you’re awkward).
Know your value. Not in terms of comp bands and title inflation, but in terms of impact. What can you change in your environment? What systems bend when you touch them?
Be impossible to ignore. Build things. Write things. Teach others. The right people are watching, even if they’re silent.
Take the hits and keep on trucking. The best hires I’ve seen were people who’d been through the wringer and came out sharper, stranger, and more sure of themselves.
Leaders Create Leaders, Not Lists
The future of work will belong to those who learn by fire. Who are hardened through repetition, exposed to risk, and made better not by certification but by confrontation.
We don’t need more polished applicants. We need initiates. People who have stepped into the arena, taken a few shots, and come back with a grin and a better idea.
If you’re a leader, stop playing gatekeeper. Start building trials. Let people show you what they can do, not just what they say they’ve done. The ones who matter will rise. The rest will wait for another system to filter them in.
And if you’re on the outside looking in? You won’t find the door. You’ll have to bomb a wall like Link to make your own entrance.
Postscript: A Warning for the Optimizers
Somewhere out there, a well-meaning soul is already trying to fix the hiring process (I’ve met a few). They’re building a better dashboard. A fairer algorithm. A scoring rubric for “grit.” It will not save us.
Because the problem was never the tools. It was always the fact that real work (like real people) is too weird to systematize. Too alive to be captured in a list.
So bury the resume. Burn the rubric. Step into the fray.
The work is waiting. But a document is no longer the way to find it.
