Why Resumes and Interviews Are Both Broken (And What I’m Doing About It)

If you talk to any recruiter about the way we hire today, you will hear a bit of desperation about how things have changed recently and for the worse. It is getting harder and harder to find the right candidate. Technology has flooded the open application process with mobs of perfect sounding resumes and cover letters. And it is burying the best hires for your team.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote what might be the oldest resume we know of. He listed specific things he had built — military engineering projects, weapons, infrastructure — concrete deliverables he could point to. Art, by contrast, he listed almost as an afterthought, a general skill. That’s it. No jargon. No summary paragraph. Just evidence.

Technology has come a long way since 1480. The resume, not so much.

The resume problem

The original purpose of a resume was simple: prove to a reader that you have the requisite experience for the role you are seeking. “I worked at Google for a decade” carries a signal. It tells you something about the candidate because Google is a hard place to get in, and even harder to stay. That tells you something.

But we’ve piled so much onto the resume since then, from skills sections, jargon-heavy summaries, to quantified impact claims, that it has become nearly impossible to know what to believe. It is rare for candidates to accurately represent their own role and impact in a complex organization. Self-reflection is hard. Who is to say that a candidate spearheaded the effort, or merely supported it, or simply participated?

And now LLMs can turn a bad resume into a polished one in seconds. So hiring managers are seeing an unprecedented volume of applications, all of which look decent. You could say we’ve optimized the format while losing the signal.

Based on the resume, it is becoming more and more difficult to ascertain whether this person actually did what they said and in the way they implied.

Resumes are not enough. But this all gets sorted out in the interview process, right?

The interview problem

Interviews should fill the gap. But interviews are broken too, for different reasons.

First: interviewers are generally bad at interviewing. It’s a skill that takes real investment to develop, and many hiring managers don’t get that investment.

Second: interviews are the wrong format entirely. I have never, in any job I’ve held, been asked to perform work the way I’m asked to perform it in an interview. The fear, the preparation, the pressure — none of it maps to how I actually think or work.

Third: interviews are optimized for finding reasons to say no, not for finding genuine alignment. Panels of five people with different biases, different lenses, not always acting in the hiring manager’s actual interest.

Some of the best hiring stories I know of didn’t involve resumes or formal interviews at all. Eric Schmidt reportedly connected with the Google founders at Burning Man. No resume. No loop. They discovered they shared values, saw the world similarly, and complemented each other. That’s the actual signal that matters — and it almost never shows up in a resume or a 45-minute interview.

The alternative is networking. But networking has its own failure mode: it’s potentially nepotistic, and it keeps outsiders out.

What I think we can do

The idea: replace the overloaded resume with a richer, more honest representation of a candidate. Help hiring managers get clearer on what they actually need. And then filter 3,000 applications down to the 5–10 people worth a real conversation, not based on keywords, but on genuine fit.

That’s what I’m building at tryneedl.ai.

It would not be far-fetched to say that change is needed. What I’m building into tryneedl.ai replicates the best of networking, finding real alignment on values, vision, and complementary skills without requiring people to already be inside the right circles.

After all, we’re not just looking at a list of skills on a page, we’re looking at discovering the best fit for candidates and teams in the most human way possible.

I think tryneedl.ai is something worth building. If this resonated, try it out. If you sign up before April 30, 2026, we will waive the fees a full year for the first 100 signups. If you have questions, please reach out to me at ben@tryneedl.ai.