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 candidat…