“We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, do the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much with so little for so long that we can now do anything with less than nothing.”  Source: Unknown 

What is it that people want to know about someone? Is it my whole background, or is it just the highlights? Is it the highlights that make for the best story, or are the true ones better because they are not the same? 

In the world of online everything, everything is a made-up version of itself. Even if I tell the most accurate version of my own story, it would be too long for some and too short for others. So, let’s look at a few case studies of how one talks about oneself and the world, and a little bit of my background. I mean, this is a page about me.  

The Legacy Resume: Are We Only What We Can Write About Ourselves?

Like most people, I have really struggled with the job market. For most of my life, I have worked in dead-end, low-wage jobs. I have spent years on the frontline of retail and food service, working long hours for tips just to keep my head above water in an economy that feels designed to keep people in compliance slots. But those survival-mode shifts do not define the boundaries of my mind, my skills, my knowledge, or my life. I am doing what I have to do because when one does not have what they need, they learn to survive with what they have. 

When I am not at my job, I am studying the world and all that makes it up. If I come across a little fact I do not know, I chase down the source and find out everything I can. Whether it is mastering a complex physical craft with my hands, analyzing regional macroeconomic data, or breaking down organizational workflows, I treat the world as a laboratory. I refuse to give up on making my life and the world better in whatever way I can, which means I am constantly hunting for the underlying blueprints of how things actually work.

One of many skills that I have yet to master is the resume, and I think I have worked out why that is. I want to lay out some facts about what a resume is and what has made it useless well before the overuse of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). One of the core principles that I live by is knowing where you are so you know where you want to go. So, I’m going to walk through the history of the resume to figure out exactly where things went wrong.

Let’s start with the definition of what a “resume” is: 

“A summary or synopsis; a brief written account of one’s education, qualifications, experiences, skills, and other relevant information, typically submitted when applying for a job or seeking admission to an educational institution.”

Over my time at university (2015 to 2025), we never covered the history of the resume. Maybe because to them it did not matter, or it was too boring a topic. However, it seems that the whole world has forgotten what history is; it is all about what you can do today, not what anything was yesterday. As a saying I have heard many times goes: 

 

 “For those who do not read history, one will find that history does not repeat, but it does rhyme.”

So, let’s do a little walk-through of the timeline and use of the résumé. 

• 1482: The earliest documented use of the résumé. Leonardo da Vinci created the first recorded résumé prototype. Around the age of 30, he sent a handwritten letter to Ludovico Sforza, the Regent (and future Duke) of Milan, seeking patronage. Da Vinci structured the text as a numbered, 10-point checklist that highlighted his engineering capabilities, including the design of lightweight bridges, defensive fortifications, waterworks, and chariots. He only slightly mentioned his ability to paint and sculpt in marble or clay at the very end of the letter. This document is preserved today in the Codex Atlanticus at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.

• Late 1500s:   In England, a land surveyor named Ralph Agas published printed advertisements in his local papers and handbills detailing his 40 years of experience, specific instruments, and past mapping projects just to secure freelance work. Around the same period, traveling English lords began handing out formal letters of professional introduction when entering new towns, which they explicitly referred to as a “resume” derived from the French word for summary.

• The 1930s: Not much is known about the resume’s history from the 1500s to the 1930s. It reemerged out of necessity during the Great Depression, following a 300-year period in which employment was dictated primarily by rigid social classes, family lineages, or local trade guilds. As job competition peaked, employment agencies expanded the written candidate summaries they frequently called “data sheets,” and they became a common, practical tool scrawled during or just before the interview.

• The 1940s – 1950s: By the 1940s, resumes had become a rigid corporate expectation. These were formal profiles that mandated highly personal details that would be illegal under modern discrimination laws, including an applicant’s age, height, weight, marital status, number of children, origin, and religion or church affiliation. A professional photograph of the applicant in a suit was also considered a default requirement. By the 1950s, providing a detailed written background was mandatory for consideration in interviews across Corporate America.

• The 1960s – 1970s: Going into the ’60s, the market saw the introduction of hobbies, interests, and extracurricular activities to help employers see applicants as people outside of work. Concurrently, the widespread adoption of IBM’s Selectric typewriter made typos a major disqualification factor. In the 1970s, personal typesetting and commercial word processing emerged, allowing applicants to design cleaner, more professionally marketed personal profiles.
• The 1980s: Career counseling services and resume-writing industries expanded rapidly, publishing hundreds of strategy guides. In the early ’80s, some job seekers even recorded their professional history on VHS tapes and mailed them directly to employers, though this trend quickly faded as personal computers became widely available. By 1987, the widespread adoption of the fax machine enabled applicants to submit resumes in bulk electronically for the first time. 

• The 1990s: The launch of online job portals like Monster.com in 1994 marked the shift from physical paper resumes to digital text files stored in centralized databases. In the late ’90s, companies began deploying early Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) automated software designed to parse digital files and filter out resumes based on keyword matching to handle the mass influx of applications.

•  2003: This marked the launch of LinkedIn, moving the static resume onto a dynamic, public-facing, and continuously updating digital profile featuring social proof such as peer recommendations and direct professional networking capabilities.

• The 2020s: We are now in the modern day, where AI search tools and advanced ATS have become the default first line for corporations. Resumes are analyzed algorithmically for specific technical keyword frequencies long before a human recruiter ever reviews the application.

The Illusion of Vetting

This is an important little adventure into history because it shows that the bar of connection between us and the resources we need to survive has a very long legacy. The issue with the resume is that, as we’ve seen, it requires a very narrow set of parameters that keeps moving. The system keeps chasing the idea that it can find only the people it wants, not the best people, and we have learned that what it wants is simply people just like them. 

By its very nature, a resume cannot tell the truth about who a candidate is. To truly understand someone, you have to meet and walk with them, to be right there where they are. The resume has always been a point of control. It started as a simple list, a way to make the hiring process easier so managers didn’t have to walk through someone’s entire history with them. You could just hand over a piece of paper that supposedly told them everything they needed to know. However, the core of the idea relies on a shared understanding of the rules. Today, it is no longer about getting the right person to the right place; it is about controlling the wrong people. 

The issue today is that we might be right back in that period between the 1500s and the 1930s. If you’re not a landed lord, someone with vast assets, or a person who came from the “proper” place with the “proper” background, you are immediately and systematically thrown out of the system and barred from ever entering employment. Your entire life is stripped out from under your control or so they like to think.

On the Ground

I have been out there. I’ve been on the ground. I have been in Academia. I have worked in, over, and around every system that an environment can produce. I can tell you that there is an absolutely incredible number of people who are simply unheard because not all of us want to share every last aspect of ourselves with the world. I am a very private person, and I like it that way because that is just the way I know how to be, and that’s how a lot of people are. We just want to do what we have to do, hoping we can eventually do what we want to do.

I have worked in low-wage jobs for many years because I got stuck in that cycle. What I have done for work in no way approaches what I can do, or even what I like to do. Yet, I never stopped learning. I never stopped going to college, even though on many days I didn’t have the gas to get there, or I didn’t eat for a few days because I didn’t have the money. I would never stop going. 

I never stopped trying to make this world a little better. If all I could do was repair a swing in the park, help someone across the street, or help develop a business plan for a struggling business, I did it. I do it because I like seeing people, the environment, and nature itself healthy and happy. We all live here. 

And I hate to tell you this, but happy people who have everything they need do more for everybody else. They do more for the economy, the environment, and the world itself. Ironically, that makes the people who already have money even wealthier. If you already have a lot of money and everyone around you is happy, producing at 100%, and putting all that production back into the market by buying your products and using your services, your business scales 10 times, 100 times over. 

Keeping people poor, keeping them frustrated, keeping them out of the loop, and keeping the information they need to make real decisions away from them is, by its very nature, destructive. It is not just destructive to them; it is destructive to the entire system. It destroys the very foundation on which wealth, business, government, and community are built. 

If you want to know who I am, I am this fight. I want, by any stretch of the imagination, to go through life knowing that the people around me have everything they need and are working for what they want.