How modern hiring systems reward representation over reality
Marcus kept the fluorescent lights low in his cubicle after hours. The office emptied early most nights, but he stayed, untangling the knot someone had left in the reporting script. He rewrote the query so it ran in half the time, then added comments nobody would read. When the dashboard finally refreshed clean, he closed the laptop without fanfare and walked to the train in the dark.
His resume sat unchanged on his desktop for months. Plain black text. Single column. No icons. Bullet points began with verbs that matched what he had actually done: Resolved. Optimized. Collaborated. No percentages pulled from thin air. No “transformed” when something had merely improved. He believed the truth carried its own weight.
Applications went out in batches of five. Most vanished. A few bounced back with the same templated line: We appreciate your interest but have chosen to pursue other candidates. He refreshed his inbox anyway. Told himself the market was competitive. That experience like his would surface eventually.
Across town, in a glass-walled building overlooking the river, Daniel sat at a rented desk. His original resume had been competent—adequate descriptions of adequate work. He had never missed a deadline badly enough to get fired, but he had never fixed anything that wasn’t already on fire either.
He fed the document into an AI prompt. Then another.
Make this sound more impactful.
Use action verbs from this job description.
He copied phrases verbatim: drove cross-functional initiatives, leveraged data-driven insights, championed stakeholder alignment. A career coach smoothed the edges for a fee. The final version read like someone who belonged in the room.
The system noticed.
Keywords matched. Scores climbed. Recruiters replied within days. Interviews followed—behavioral questions he had rehearsed in the mirror. He spoke with steady eye contact, repeating polished narratives. Offers arrived.
He accepted one quickly. The title carried weight. The salary did too.
Marcus kept applying. He saw the same postings reappear weeks later, unchanged. He considered tweaking his own bullets—adding a zero here, a stronger adjective there. The cursor hovered. He closed the file instead. If the job required performance rather than proof, maybe it wasn’t the right fit.
Time folded forward.
One Monday, Daniel walked into the conference room for his first team stand-up as manager. The transfer from support had already arrived, laptop open, notes ready. Marcus looked up and recognized the face from a shared project years earlier. Neither spoke of it.
Daniel outlined the quarter’s goals with confident slides. Marcus listened, nodding once or twice. By the end of the week he was quietly rewriting the flawed migration plan Daniel had inherited. He caught duplicate records before they reached production. Rerouted alerts so they didn’t flood the new director. When questions came up in the next review, Daniel answered smoothly. The fixes were attributed upward.
Performance reviews arrived on schedule. Daniel’s praised vision and leadership. Marcus’s noted reliability, strong support, excellent technical contribution. The words were kind. The box checked was Meets Expectations.
Marcus trained the summer intern who would later report to someone Daniel promoted. He documented the legacy system nobody else understood. He stayed late again when the pipeline broke at 2 a.m.
Daniel moved to a larger office with better light. His resume updated itself almost automatically now—new achievements appended, old ones polished brighter. Recruiters reached out unprompted.
Marcus’s file remained the same single page.
One afternoon Daniel paused outside Marcus’s cubicle, coffee in hand.
“You’ve been here longer than most,” he said. “Any advice for the team?”
Marcus looked up from the screen.
“Document everything,” he replied. “Even the small things. You never know when someone will need to understand how it really works.”
Daniel nodded, smiled the practiced smile, and walked on.
The fluorescent hum filled the silence that followed.
Neither man ever said the rest aloud.
The organization ran smoothly. Targets were hit. Bonuses distributed. From the outside, the hierarchy made sense.
Only the two of them knew that the system had chosen the version of the story that read best on the page.
The screens kept glowing long after the building went quiet. One resume continued to open doors. The other stayed folded in a folder marked Archive.