Reflections 28th June
On the nature of reputation
A resume is not a reputation.
Last week I wrote about the apparatus large organisations build to manage the gap between what they are and what they want to be seen as being. The individual looking for work now faces a smaller version of the same temptation, and now has a technology that will act on it in seconds.
Resumes are now largely functionally useless. They can be created, copied, counterfeited, and manipulated to the point at which they contain little of value, and are about as much help in determining the qualities of who they describe as a PR department is for understanding the organisation that employs them.
Most are now read first by software that scores them for keywords, which means the document is increasingly written by one machine to satisfy another, while the person who is supposedly its subject becomes an uninvolved observer.
Michael Spence showed, in 1973, that a credential conveys information only when it is differentially costly to fake; costly for the weak candidate, cheaper for the strong one. The resume worked as a signal precisely because producing a convincing one carried a cost, in credentialing and in effort, roughly correlated with what it claimed. When AI makes the illusion of competence practically free, it drives that cost to zero for everyone. The signal stops separating the strong from the weak, so it carries no useful information.
Two things have happened at once, and last week’s argument was the first of them. AI has made competence cheap; the knowledge needed to be adequate in almost any field is now close to free. It has also made the documents that claims competence free to produce and free to counterfeit. The market has lost, in a single season, both its common signal and the scarcity that signal stood for. What it searches for instead is what has not become free: judgement, conduct, the standards a person holds when the work is hard, and the people prepared to vouch for them.
None of that fits in a template.
Once the honest and the optimised cannot be told apart, the resume settles every question but the one that matters. An individual may dress one up out of desperation; a PR company does it for a fee; the moral distance between the two is real. Neither survives contact with the experienced reality of work itself.
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An artist or an artisan presenting what they have made is doing something else entirely. The work is in the room. It can be picked up, turned over, examined; it cannot be talked into being something it is not. Where a resume asks to be trusted, the made thing asks to be assayed, while the maker stands beside it while that happens.
This is the difference between shaping yourself to a stated need and asking to be understood for what you do; the first is a sign of dependency, a need to be chosen, and a machine will now force you into the appropriate shape in seconds. The instinct Austin Kleon distilled as showing your work points the same way: a portfolio is a reputation made visible, offered to be examined rather than believed. Pye’s distinction, which I used last week for the apparatus of consequence, applies as well to how we present ourselves as to how we work: the workmanship of risk shows the thing and lets it be judged; the workmanship of certainty manages the impression and hopes the judging never comes. Being prepared to show our work is a matter of agency. In a market where the claim has become worthless, the made thing, and our willingness to stand next to it, is most of what remains.
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A reputation is a vaguely magical thing that we can neither construct nor manage. It includes everything we would like to have in it, everything we would not, and everything we do not even know is there. A resume, by contrast, is easily built by AI to fit precisely the stated and implied demands of an employer.
A manager who takes the time to listen, without judgement, to what is going on in a subordinate’s life. A recruiter whose busyness keeps them from the small courtesy of a reply to the candidates they have turned down. An employee who thinks about the prompt, and what it returns, before using either. These are cornerstones of reputation, and none of them appears on a resume. The first two are conduct other people see, and what people see travels; the recruiter who leaves a rejected candidate unanswered has, without meaning to, spoken to everyone that candidate will ever mention it to. Reputation has always lived in small numbers and long memories, in the people who were there and talk afterwards. The third cornerstone is quieter. No one is watching when someone weighs a prompt before using it; it is judgement exercised in private, and it works its way into everything that person makes. The part of our conduct that no presentation can reach is exactly the part a reputation is built from. I think these things matter now more than at any time since somebody whose soul had been temporarily misplaced coined the term “Human Resources”.
Resumes have rules. They have conventions, templates, formats, and a literature of best practice.
Reputations obey no such rules. They are not ours to bring into the room.
They come from somewhere, though. A reputation comes alive in the response to the unexpected question, in the willingness to push back, constructively, when you see a thing differently from the room. It lives in generosity: picking something up from someone and handing it back in better shape, without expecting thanks. It is a thousand small things, none of them thought about, most of them with no place in any process; what the process wants is a meat-based algorithm, holding a space until a silicon-based one has warmed up. It lives, above all, in the willingness to take on the workmanship of risk, to put the things that earn a reputation on the line, where the workmanship of certainty would keep them safe and untested.
This sounds like a contradiction. It is not. We can neither construct a reputation nor manage it, yet it forms entirely out of things we choose to do or leave undone. We tend the practice; reputation is the residue, and we do not get to reach in and edit it. What we can choose, beyond the work itself, is the company we keep in doing it: the people who see how we work, and whose word carries because they were there. In a market where every claim can be manufactured, that word is the thing that cannot. I think that perhaps reputation and anticipation are closely correlated, for good or bad. Reputation is evidence for anticipation, in a way a resume can never be, and has started to travel again the way it did before the paperwork, from one person to another, on trust.
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I am beginning to understand how the evolving thing we call AI can be our worst enemy and our best friend, sometimes within the same hour. It is the enemy when we let it do the work we should do ourselves, when we pass on what it tells us without checking, and when we present its output as our own. Used that way it will hollow out a reputation faster than any machine tool, because it removes the one thing a reputation is made from: contact with the work.
It is the friend when we bring it something we have noticed and refuse to let it think for us. You arrive with a rough observation, a half-formed connection, a sense that two things belong together without yet knowing why. It will not develop the idea or do the reading, but it stays with you while you turn the material over, holds the loose threads steady long enough for you to see which of them hold, and hands them back for you to keep or discard. The work stays yours. It keeps you company in the doing, and the doing is where the reputation lives. Used like that, it helps us become more of who we already are.
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Reputation is not a coin that can be forged, nor a veneer laid over an inferior substrate to give the appearance of something it is not. It is closer to a patina, gathered over time, formed out of success and failure and whatever we manage to learn from each. It is something we polish away at our peril, the moment we try to be something else.
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The metaphor I keep returning to for this is alchemical: the athanor and the alembic, the fire and the still, vessels for a slow transformation whose product is rarely what you set out to make and usually worth more. It is an idea I have worked with for nearly a year, and one I am now ready to take from theory into practice.
More on that over the coming month.