The cursor blinks. It’s the only thing moving in the room. A tiny, rhythmic pulse of judgment on a sea of white. You’re trying to find another way to say you answered phone calls and forwarded emails. ‘Managed multi-channel communication streams to facilitate synergistic information flow across key enterprise verticals.’ That sounds important. It also sounds like you’re trying to hide something, which you are. You’re trying to hide the fact that the job was mostly boring, that you spent a good chunk of your time staring at the same blinking cursor, and that your real accomplishment was not losing your mind under fluorescent lighting for 46 hours a week.

We all do it. We take the dull, jagged, and beautifully human reality of our work and sand it down, polish it with corporate jargon, and present it as a flawless narrative of ever-increasing success. Your resume isn’t a record of your past; it’s a fantasy novel about a protagonist who has never made a mistake, never had a bad day, and always ‘exceeded expectations.’ It’s a work of historical fiction, and the history is yours.

The Language of Algorithms

I used to be a purist about this. I truly believed that honesty and clarity were the best policy. I’d read my friends’ resumes and scoff. “You didn’t ‘spearhead a paradigm shift in client engagement strategies,'” I’d say, “You convinced Dave from accounting to use the new CRM.” And then, I watched those same friends get interviews for jobs I was far more qualified for. My honest, clear resume, which stated I ‘fixed bugs in legacy code,’ was getting trashed by algorithms looking for ‘proactive system remediation and optimization.’ My resume was being read by a machine that didn’t understand nuance, only keywords. And so, I learned to lie. Or rather, I learned to translate.

It’s a bizarre ritual. We write fiction for robots to read, hoping to be granted an audience with a human who likely spends less than 16 seconds scanning the document before making a decision. That first human screener often doesn’t even understand the job they’re hiring for. They have a checklist of keywords, a pattern to match. Your carefully crafted fiction is judged not on its story, but on its SEO. The entire process is a game of broken telephone, where the message gets more distorted at every step.

The Performance of Truth

My friend Reese H. is a hotel mystery shopper. Her entire job is a performance. She checks in under an alias, meticulously documents the crispness of the bedsheets, the temperature of the water, the sincerity of the concierge’s smile. She has a 236-point checklist. She then writes a report, a narrative of her stay. It’s fiction, in a way. It’s a constructed experience designed to test the reality of the service. She’s pretending to be a guest to find out what it’s really like to be a guest. Her reports are trusted because her fiction is in service of a greater truth. Your resume is the inverse of this. It’s a fictional narrative designed to obscure the messy truth of what it’s like to be a worker, a person with strengths and flaws, in favor of presenting a perfect, hirable product. Reese gets paid to expose the cracks; you get paid only if you successfully plaster them over.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that this is just ‘how it’s done.’ That professionalism requires this level of artifice. I remember once putting on a resume that I was an ‘expert’ in a specific data visualization software. I’d used it for a project for about three weeks. In the interview, they sat me down in front of a terminal and asked me to build a dashboard from a raw data set. I froze. I could do the basics, sure, but an expert? The silence in that room was louder than any alarm. I failed, spectacularly. The worst part wasn’t the failure itself, but the dawning realization that I had created this trap for myself by playing a game I simultaneously despised. I was trying to speak the language of the algorithm, and I forgot that a human might eventually call my bluff.

The Signal, Not The Words

It’s not about the words, it’s about the signal.

That’s the part we miss. The resume’s primary purpose is no longer to communicate your skills. It is to signal that you understand the rules of the corporate hiring game and are willing to play. Using the right jargon, the correct formatting, the approved action verbs-it’s like wearing the right clothes to a party. It doesn’t mean you’re interesting or fun, it just means you know the dress code. You’re proving you can conform. The most valuable skill your resume demonstrates is your ability to write a successful resume.

This obsession with arbitrary rules is everywhere. Do you write it on one page or two? Do you use a serif or a sans-serif font? These debates rage on forums, with self-proclaimed gurus offering definitive answers. It reminds me of the history of paper sizes. The standard 8.5×11 inch letter paper in the US is a completely arbitrary size, a historical accident. Yet, submitting a resume on a slightly different-sized paper would be seen as a sign of lunacy. We adhere to these invisible, meaningless standards while a machine is scanning for the phrase ‘synergistic growth hacking’ and couldn’t care less about your font choice. The whole system is a performance designed to make a deeply chaotic and subjective process feel objective and meritocratic. It isn’t. A promotion might be decided over a round of golf, but you need 6 bullet points under each job title to even be considered.

We optimize everything now, turning every aspect of our lives into a game to be won. We track our sleep, our steps, our screen time, all for a slightly better score. The job hunt is no different. You’re not a person looking for fulfilling work; you’re a player trying to level up, grinding for the XP needed to beat the next boss-the automated applicant tracking system. We seek out cheats and workarounds, not just in games but in our professional lives. It’s all about finding the right currency to advance, whether it’s the perfect keyword on a resume or a simple شحن يلا لودو. The underlying drive is the same: to win the game according to its own absurd rules. The goal is to get past the gatekeeper, digital or human, to get to the next level, where a potential salary increase of $676 a month awaits.

The Compromise

So I gave up my purist stance. I learned the language. I helped friends translate their genuine, valuable experiences into the stilted dialect of HR-speak. I taught them to turn ‘helped customers with problems’ into ‘orchestrated customer-centric solutions to drive retention and satisfaction metrics.’ I hate it. But I also know that refusing to play the game doesn’t make you noble; it just makes you unemployed. It’s a quiet, soul-crushing compromise. You’re writing for an audience of one-an algorithm-and its tastes are terrible.

And the worst part is the silence that follows. You send your meticulously crafted fiction out into the void. You hit ‘submit’ on your 46th application of the month, and there’s no confirmation, no reply, just the quiet hum of your laptop. Your story, your highly embellished character sheet, is now in a database, waiting for a machine to decide if it’s worth a human’s time. You’ve boiled down years of your life, your triumphs, your struggles, your late nights, and your moments of brilliance into a single PDF file, a ghost in the machine. Reese H. at least gets to check out of the hotel. You just have to sit there, staring at the screen, waiting for the cursor to start blinking again.