Leonardo da Vinci is often credited with writing the first resume in 1482, meaning the resume has been with us for more than five centuries. And though its layout has evolved over the years, the premise hasn’t: a piece of paper that tells someone where you’ve worked, what you studied, and maybe a bullet or two about what you’ve accomplished.
That’s the problem. 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. Too often, the “best” resume isn’t from the most qualified candidate—it’s from the one who figured out how to game the system.
And yet resumes persist. Why? Because they’re easy. They’re free to create. Most people (sort of) know how to make one. Employers ask for them. Entire hiring systems are built around them. They’re the definition of “meh—it’s good enough.”
But good enough is no longer enough.
WHAT BETTER LOOKS LIKE
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.
So what would better look like? A new standard has to do what resumes can’t: Capture actual skills. Not just where you’ve been, but what you can do—and what “extras” make you uniquely you and uniquely qualified. It has to be structured, so it can travel across technologies. Standardized, so hiring managers can make real comparisons. Accessible, so you don’t need expensive software or a design degree to present yourself fairly. And anonymizable, so the three pound caloric monsters in evaluators’ skulls can’t fall back on the same biased shortcuts resumes encourage.
Of course, the hard part isn’t dreaming up the new standard. It’s building the bridge. We can’t assume every applicant will suddenly have the time or access to build a digital skills profile. And we certainly can’t expect that employers will throw out their applicant tracking systems overnight (even if they might want to). We need technology that can translate existing resumes into skills-based profiles, while slotting neatly into the workflows companies already use. That’s how you shift the system: not by burning it down, but by giving people a clear path to make the switch.
I know some will say the resume is too entrenched, too universal to ever disappear. They’re probably right in the short term. But history is full of standards that seemed permanent—landlines, CDs, even fax machines—until they weren’t. The resume has lasted 543 years not because it was brilliant, but because it was familiar. Familiarity isn’t a good enough reason to keep failing candidates and employers alike.
If we want hiring to be fairer, faster, and more predictive, we need to blow up the resume and build something better. The future of work isn’t about paper credentials—it’s about the skills that predict how a person will perform in a role. And it’s past time our hiring systems caught up.
Natasha Nuytten is CEO of CLARA.