The paper has a weight, a certain gloss. It says, ‘Spearheaded the synergistic actualization of cross-functional paradigms.‘ My eye twitches, just a little. I know what this means. It means Dave, or maybe Jennifer, sat in 41 meetings that could have been emails and nodded while someone else drew on a whiteboard. But the algorithm liked the word ‘paradigm’. The algorithm, which has never had to comfort a crying colleague or solve a problem with duct tape and a prayer, flagged this resume as ‘high-potential.’ So here we are. The fiction is on my desk, and my job for the next 31 minutes is to pretend to believe it.

The Ritual of ‘Hiring’

We all participate in this quiet little theatre. We call it ‘hiring.’ But it’s a ritual, a performance where everyone has a script. The candidate performs the role of the ‘Ideal Employee,’ a person who doesn’t exist. This character speaks only in action verbs, has never made a mistake that wasn’t a profound learning opportunity, and is passionate about everything, especially shareholder value. The company, in turn, performs the role of the ‘Perfect Workplace.’ In this fantasy, the culture is always ‘collaborative’ and ‘fast-paced,’ everyone is ‘like a family,’ and the work is always ‘changing the world,’ even if the job is just optimizing ad-click revenue by 0.01%.

The Foundational Fiction: A 91% Probability

The resume is the foundational text for this play. It’s the origin story of the hero. And according to a study of 1,321 hiring managers, it has up to a 91% chance of containing misleading information. We know this. We know that ‘managed a team of 11‘ might mean one of them was an unpaid intern who only worked on Fridays. We know that ‘increased efficiency by 121%‘ is a number pulled from the same air that powers their stated ‘blue-sky thinking.’ We know it’s a story. And we ask for it anyway.

Tangled Threads of Jargon

I was untangling Christmas lights last week. In July. Don’t ask. It’s a knot of green plastic and broken promises of holiday cheer, and you pull one end, and a tangle 11 feet away tightens into a Gordian fist. That’s what this process feels like. You pull on the thread of ‘synergistic paradigms’ and you find it’s connected to nothing but another knot of jargon. The real light, the one person who could actually do the job, is probably buried in the middle, their bulb smashed because they didn’t know the right corporate language to protect themselves. They said ‘I helped make things better‘ instead of ‘I facilitated a multi-stakeholder initiative to enhance operational excellence.‘ And so they were discarded.

The Unquantifiable Human

I met a man named Ian P. last year. He’s a grief counselor. He told me his job is to sit in the silence with people until they can hear themselves again. To just be present in a room saturated with pain, not to fix it, not to solve it, but to witness it. To give it space. How do you put that on a resume? ‘Optimized post-bereavement auditory self-recognition‘? ‘Leveraged empathic stillness to facilitate emotional throughput‘? It’s absurd. His value isn’t in a bullet point; it’s in the space between them. Ian would never get past the algorithm. He’d be filtered out for a lack of ‘quantifiable outcomes.’ We’ve built a system that would reject the very people we need most, the ones who deal in messy, unquantifiable humanity, all for the sake of a clean, sortable lie.

We are filtering for the best storytellers, not the best doers.

A profound realization in the modern hiring landscape.

The Cost of Fiction

And I’ll admit, I fell for it. Hard. I once hired a guy whose resume was a masterpiece. It read like a script for a movie where he was the star. Every bullet point was an action verb that punched you in the gut. Results, metrics, ROI-it was all there. I was sold. He lasted 71 days. He was a brilliant resume writer and a terrible collaborator. He could sell the story of the work, but he couldn’t do the work. The fiction was beautiful. The reality cost us time and an estimated $11,351 in lost productivity. The great irony is that I got my own first real job with a resume I typed on my dad’s old typewriter. It had a typo. A glaring one. But the man who hired me said he was looking for a writer, not a typist. He saw something the paper failed to convey. He was willing to look past the fiction.

The Origin of the Narrative

This obsession with neat, quantifiable summaries starts early. We do it to children first. We take 11 years of curiosity, struggle, and late-night breakthroughs and flatten them into a Grade Point Average. A transcript becomes the first great work of fiction a person produces, a story that says more about their ability to navigate a system than their actual potential to think or create. It’s a process that misses the point entirely, rewarding compliance over genuine intellect. It’s why some are rethinking the entire model, focusing on what a student can do and who they are, not just the numbers they produce. An Accredited Online K12 School that builds a curriculum around the student, for instance, operates on the principle that a person is more than their transcript. It’s a shame we forget that lesson the moment we ask for a resume.

The Liar’s Market

From the transcript to the resume, we demand a simplified narrative. We punish nuance. The candidate who includes a project that failed-truly failed, not one of those ‘my biggest weakness is I care too much‘ failures-is seen as incompetent, not honest. The one who admits they don’t have experience in one of the 21 required skills for the 1 position is screened out, instead of being seen as self-aware. We’ve created a liar’s market. We bemoan the lack of authenticity in the workplace, and yet our very gateway demands we shed it and don a costume.

The Security Blanket of Data Points

And I get it. We need a filter. There are 231 applicants for this one job. I don’t have time to have a deep, meaningful conversation with every single one. I need a tool for triage. And so we cling to this flawed, brittle document because the alternative-actually getting to know people, investing time upfront, trusting your gut-is slow and unscalable and terrifyingly human. The resume is a security blanket. It lets us pretend that people are data points. That a human life, with all its messy detours and glorious failures, can be neatly contained on a single piece of 8.5 x 11 paper.

It can’t. The person you’re looking for might have a gap in their resume because they were caring for a dying parent. In that time, they learned more about patience, empathy, and crisis management than any MBA program could ever teach them. But all the algorithm sees is a void. An error. A deviation from the acceptable fiction. The story is what matters. And we’re still only reading the cover.