Artificial intelligence isn’t just being blamed for killing jobs; it’s exposing the fundamental flaw in one of hiring’s oldest tools: the résumé.
Thanks to AI, any applicant can churn out a polished, professional-looking version with a few basic prompts — regardless of their qualifications. Frustrated companies have responded in kind by deploying the technology to sort the submissions.
The methods may have changed, but this is a familiar tug-of-war. For close to a century, the résumé has been the focus of an intense struggle between job seekers hoping to present themselves in the most flattering light and employers eager to find the best candidate. But its usefulness was short-lived at best and should have been replaced with a better way to evaluate job seekers long ago.
Though it’s possible to find documents that look vaguely like a résumé prior to the 1920s, the version we know today came into its own that decade. Researchers in what’s now known as industrial and organizational psychology grappled with a challenge confronting large corporations: what was the best way to screen the applications of hundreds of job candidates about whom next to nothing was known?
Up until then, many employers placed great reliance on a “Letter of Application,” or what we would simply call a cover letter. Then, as now, it invited applicants to explain why they were particularly qualified or well-suited for a particular job, noting their experience, talents, and temperament.
Donald Laird, a professor at Colgate University, thought it was ridiculous that managers would rely on these letters to pick the best candidates. In his popular 1925 book, The Psychology of Selecting Men, he heaped scorn on the cover letter. He pointed to a number of real-world experiments showing that applicants tended to overstate their qualifications and otherwise mislead potential employers.
Nonetheless, managers put great faith in them. To counter this, Lairdpublicized a number of tests that demonstrated how managers could be easily gulled by the inflated self-assessments of job applicants, or simply react in subjective, unpredictable ways. A candidate whom one manager ranked first would be ranked last by another. When shown the same letters a month later, some managers completely reversed their initial judgment.
Laird and other members of the industrial and organizational psychology field advocated for “scientific” methods of assessing job candidates, such as objective tests of skill — for example, a typing test. They also advanced the heretical idea that the standard “Letter of Application” should come with a sobering chaser: a dull, just-the-facts recitation of the applicant’s job history, education, references and other objective data. Initially, researchers called it a “data sheet” or “qualifications brief.” Whatever the name, make no mistake: the résumé had arrived.
Applicants quickly realized that the new addition, far from being an obstacle to selling themselves, could be a useful tool in the struggle to stand out from others. In a confession from 1952, one job candidate described how he had typed up his résumé and then brought it to a copy shop, paying extra for a printing process that “makes each piece look as if it is a hand-typed original” — proof that the résumé in question had been specially prepared for this one position. Then he sent out 100 copies to different organizations.
With that hack, job candidates began submitting résumés regardless of whether a job opening asked for one. In 1958, the Wall Street Journal interviewed an executive from a placement firm, who reported: “We send out about 50,000 resumes a week. Ten years ago, it was closer to 500.” An executive with Borg-Warner Corporation likewise declared: “Everybody in middle management keeps a résumé handy these days. It’s just part of the businessman’s briefcase.”
Increasingly, human resources departments noticed that applicants used the résumé to tell white lies, and even bigger fibs, listing fictitious degrees, fake promotions and other embellishments.
By 1968, the Journal found that résumé padding had reached epidemic proportions. “Most firms say they tolerate — and even expect — a certain amount of fudging in applicants’ resumes,” the paper reported. A personnel manager was quoted as saying, “Most of us have a tendency to look the other way when a guy who looks like a real winner is caught in a small lie.”
When the ’70s and ’80s came around, employers confronted an additional challenge: the rise of a new industry dedicated to helping job candidates draft the best possible résumés. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with this, but outsourcing the writing to professionals only underscored the degree to which this humble document, once meant to blunt the puffery of the cover letter, had now become the leading weapon in the job seeker’s arsenal.
In 1996, hired-gun résumé writers even got their own professional organization: the National Résumé Writers Association. The advent of the internet around the same time made a growing number of résumé-writing templates and guides available to anyone with a modem.
It’s no wonder we’ve forgotten that sheet of paper’s original function. As one workplace expert told the New York Times in 2006: “A good résumé is not simply a rehash of past responsibilities, it’s a celebration of successes.” To that, I say it’s time for more employers to rediscover the virtues of screening applicants by administering skills tests and having prospective employees work for (paid) trial periods before tendering a formal offer.
The résumé may have been created with good intentions, but it has never performed the job it was supposed to do. It’s time to let it go.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Stephen Mihm, a professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.”
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