The Hiring Leak | Article 3: The Resume Proxy
A résumé is supposed to be a summary of experience.
In practice, it often becomes a substitute for judgment.
When hiring under pressure, we want certainty. And résumés feel concrete. They are neat, comparable, and fast to scan. So we begin to treat them not as evidence, but as proof.
That’s where the leak starts.
Proxies Are Not the Problem
Using proxies is not wrong. Every system uses them.
We can’t observe someone’s full decision-making process in a few hours. We can’t simulate years of real work. So we use stand-ins:
- Company names
- Job titles
- Years of experience
- Tool lists
Proxies exist because reality is too complex to measure directly.
The problem starts when we forget that a proxy is not the thing itself.
Brand Names Feel Like Guarantees
Seeing a familiar company name creates a sense of safety.
“If they passed that hiring bar, they must be good.”
“If they survived there, they’ll survive here.”
But organizations don’t hire for universal competence.
They hire for their environment.
A person can be highly effective inside a mature system with:
- Clear ownership
- Strong support functions
- Established architecture
- Slow, deliberate change
And struggle badly inside a system that requires:
- Ambiguous decision-making
- Constant tradeoffs
- Weak documentation
- High autonomy
The résumé doesn’t tell you which world they learned in.
Titles Compress Reality
“Senior,” “Staff,” or “Lead” look like portable labels.
But titles hide more than they reveal.
Two people with the same title may have had completely different responsibilities:
- One made decisions
- One executed decisions
- One had strong technical authority
- One relied on organizational momentum
The title remains.
The context disappears.
So we import expectations that were never earned in this system.
Tool Lists Are Often Accidental
We treat tool experience as intent.
“Kubernetes expert.”
“React specialist.”
“Distributed systems background.”
But many tools are inherited, not chosen.
Someone may have:
- Maintained a system they didn’t design
- Followed patterns they didn’t question
- Operated within constraints they didn’t set
The résumé tells us what they touched, not why or how.
The Proxy Collapse
Over time, proxies start to replace thinking.
We stop asking:
- What kind of problems did they actually solve?
- What tradeoffs did they make?
- Where did they struggle?
- What did they learn the hard way?
And we start asking:
- Does this look impressive?
- Does this feel familiar?
- Does this match past hires?
The hiring process becomes faster—but less accurate.
When the Mismatch Appears
Months later, the surprise arrives:
- “They’re not as senior as we thought”
- “They need more direction than expected”
- “They don’t handle ambiguity well”
But nothing changed.
The résumé did exactly what it was capable of doing:
It gave us a compressed, lossy summary.
The mistake was treating that summary as a guarantee.
The Real Cost
The Resume Proxy doesn’t just cause bad hires.
It creates misaligned expectations.
The person feels they are failing.
The team feels they were misled.
The organization adds process to compensate.
Everyone pays for a decision that was made quietly, early, and with good intentions.
The Core Insight
A résumé is a starting point, not a verdict.
When we let proxies replace curiosity, we don’t just misjudge people—we misconfigure the system.
The next leak happens when we try to “fix” this problem in interviews, and accidentally select for performance instead of reality.
That’s the Interview Performance Bias.