It’s time to re-invent how we narrate the story of our professional lives. The current tools we use to explain who we are professionally, Linkedin profiles and Resumes, are broken. They were built for a previous age, when careers were linear, talent was locally sourced, and information was easy to vet within your network. But in our globally competitive, highly differentiated world, these tools fail to do justice both to the talent whose stories they tell and to the employers who receive them.

For instance, if you try sending your resume for a position will result in a 10-20% response rate. For top companies, over 50% of their hiring is done through referrals. Companies aren’t using resumes anymore but rather sourcing from networks and referrals.

What’s so bad about a world that relies on networked searches? Networked searches create biases, hurt people that don't have strong networks, and move value away from the employee. They inhibit employers from accessing the full swath of top talent in the world and bound them by the reach of their personal networks. In a hyper-connected global market, this is a meaningful handicap for companies.

We need better tools to tell our stories. Tools that are built for a digitally-native, creative global workforce. Where information is owned by the talent but can be trusted and easily understood by the hiring manager. Where conversations are sparked by open passions, interests, and side projects, and where we eliminate the humble bragging culture, conversations, and posts where only the best self-marketers win.

The world around has rapidly changed. We are in the midst of a transformation in how humanity operates, moving from an industrial age to a new digital age. This is impacting every part of our lives - our political structures, our financial systems, the way we communicate with each other, and even the food we consume. It is causing a transformative shift in how we perceive work and how we spend the productive time of our lives. Previous generations thought about careers or jobs. They joined a workplace where they assumed that they would spend a large chunk of their lives. Many went to college and learned a profession, becoming accountants, lawyers, doctors etc. They then joined an accounting firm or a legal firm, coming every day to the EY or Deloitte factory and running the same process over and over again, getting better at it with each iteration. As they specialized in running this process, they earned promotions, became managers and then partners, and reaped large economic benefits

We, the generation navigating the workforce today, understand that if we build our futures on running existing processes rather than creating new ways of doing things, then we are in trouble. In the next few decades, the role of process-runners is being automated out. Legal tech is automating the role of some of the most senior lawyers, bookkeeping software is automating the roles of many accountants and DallE-2  is going to automate the role of some of the top designers. The employees that run processes for a living will constantly need to compete with the algorithms that are quickly getting better and cheaper. In parallel, the people that can write the algorithms, that can generate ideas and new ways of doing things, are going to become more valuable and get a bigger piece of the pie.

The millennials and Zoomers understand this. They understand that the world has changed. They know they can’t rely on companies and institutions to provide them with life-long learning and employment. They understand that they need to take control of their personal brands and how they are perceived in the world. That is why they care more about their GitHub or blog posts than their promotion. That is why they have three passion projects in parallel to their day jobs. And that is why they are changing jobs every 18 months. They intuitively understand that they need to build a passion, they need to be able to create and they need to own their careers.

The tools we use to tell our stories are fit for the old world. They are analog and easily corrupted. The first resume was written in 1482 by Leonardo De-Vinci to explain why he should be hired as a bridge builder. Resumes since evolved as a staple of the industrial age. A resume details what factory you worked at, on what machine, and for how long. They worked well when you could easily understand from them what a person can do (which machine he can run) when the role you needed him to play was similar to his previous role, and when the longer he operated the machine the better he got at it.

A resume is a legacy tool from when careers were linear progressions, so professional storytelling was simplistic. Talent was sourced locally (either within a geography or an industry) so details could easily be vetted and reference checks were sufficient. The biggest revolution to resumes in the past century has been Linkedin, which basically allowed you to upload the same old-fashioned resume into a digital format (and connect it to a cringy news feed). We still operate in this analog fashion, with digitized, monetized versions of these analog tools (think Linkedin), in a complex, global digital world.

As the world around us changes we need a new tool to tell our professional stories. This new tool needs to be built from the ground up for this new world and must fit a few prerequisites.

1. It needs to be built for a global workforce, easily understandable by every person you meet regardless of your overlapping networks.

2. It needs to be digitally native, such that you can be searched and contacted by anyone in the world.

3. It needs to be easily trusted, reducing the friction needed to verify and test information.

4. It needs to be sovereign, owned by the talent, providing them with the ability to tell their stories and move them around the digital world as they see fit.

Many people are trying to create this new tool. They are mainly approaching it as a data collection and data processing problem. They are creating automated talent systems (ATS) with keyword searches. They are creating personality tests or skill assessment tests that try to predict who you are. Or they are creating automated ways to scrape your work and try to understand who you are.

We believe that the new tool won’t come from better data processing but rather from a different alignment of incentives across the talent ecosystem. Most of the information about people is locked in the head of other people that know them. If we can incentivize the people that know you to help the people that want to know you, by providing accurate and truthful information that can be easily trusted and evaluated, we can rebuild the pipes of the talent eco-system in a way that is fit for the digital age.

In part two of this piece, we will explain how aligning these incentives might work and how we can build something new that makes the talent ecosystem much more efficient and cooperative. Stay tuned….