Member-only story
Hiring is Broken
How is it, that in our modern world we haven’t fixed such a critical economic component?
Our digital world has been transformative to our entire existence. Never before has any single 25-year window seen as radical a change as what we have seen between 1996 and 2021. Even if we pull the period from 1940 until 1965 or 1900 to 1925, major sea changes in human existence, they pale in comparison to the last 25 years.
We have moved from data interchange via fax and phone to data moving at the speed of an API call. From a time when companies still largely shopped for ad space in the local paper or television station to a wide array of digital marketplaces. We’ve watched the digitization of huge swaths of data types to facilitate ingestion and processing from medical to finance to all manner of other less complex data.
But, to get a job, we still rely on the tried and true resume and cover letter.
I can remember the first time a teacher led my class on putting a resume together, which was likely around 1988 or thereabouts. It was probably in the era when Reagan was being questioned about Iran-Contra, the Keating Five were in the papers, or Robert Bork was failing his confirmation hearings.
That long ago.
