AI is hastening the résumé's demise. Good riddance

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

- STEPHEN MIHM

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?