The Resume Is Dead. It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet.
The cursor blinks. It’s been blinking for at least 15 minutes, a tiny, relentless black rectangle mocking me from the void of the white page. My coffee is cold. My shoulders are clenched somewhere up around my ears. All I have to do is summarize the last 45 months of my professional life-a sprawling, chaotic project with a budget of $855,575, a team of 5 brilliant but difficult people, and a stakeholder who changed his mind more often than the weather-into a single, elegant bullet point. It needs to start with an action verb. Of course it does.
“Spearheaded”? Too grandiose. “Managed”? So beige it’s invisible. “Executed”? Makes it sound like I took it out behind the chemical sheds. The blinking continues, a digital heartbeat for a document that has no life in it. And it hits me, not as an intellectual concept, but as a physical wave of exhaustion: this whole exercise is a lie. The resume is a fossil. We’ve polished it, optimized it, and placed it under museum glass, but it’s the skeletal remains of a creature that no longer walks the earth.
