Why the Resume Is Broken and What Comes Next

In December of 2022, Jacob Schlittenhardt's startup died in roughly a day.

Not the slow kind of death, where a company fades out over a few quarters and everyone sees it coming. The house of cards kind. There on Tuesday, gone on Wednesday. He went into the holidays with no job, no income, and a house he had just bought.

So he did the ordinary thing. He applied for work. More than a thousand applications over the following year.

Not one of them turned into an offer.

The job he eventually landed came from a cold message on LinkedIn that he assumed was spam and left sitting for a week.

Twelve months after that, he was put in charge of a new product initiative and handed an assignment: build the team, ten people, four weeks. He posted the roles. Eight hundred resumes came back, and they were functionally one resume printed eight hundred times. Written by ChatGPT. Tuned against his own job description. Identical.

He did what anyone would do. He zipped the whole pile, dropped it into ChatGPT, and asked which people he should interview.

ChatGPT loved all of them. Every candidate a perfect fit.

That was the moment the whole thing came apart. A year earlier he had felt clever for running his resume through ChatGPT before every application, never once considering that every other applicant on Earth was doing precisely the same thing. Now he was on the other side of the table doing the exact thing he had resented: sampling at random, then going quiet on everyone else.

In an episode titled "Why the Resume Is Broken and What Comes Next," Killer Growth co-founder Samuel McVay asked him to start at the beginning. This is where the conversation about Planetary Talent actually begins.

What the Episode Digs Into

The panel that broke the spell. At Seattle Tech Startup Week, Jacob sat front row, dead center, notebook open, for a session on HR and AI. Former Microsoft and Amazon people. Millions raised. Thirty minutes in he felt let down and could not say why. Then an audience member asked how their system handles applicants writing resumes with ChatGPT, and the answer was a long explanation of how their AI reads the applicant's AI. Everyone in the room was bolting new technology onto infrastructure nobody had questioned in centuries.

Why the paper is the problem, not the pile. The eight and a half by eleven inch sheet we keep passing back and forth has not meaningfully changed since the Middle Ages. Write a notice of what you need. Pin it in the town square. Hope the right stranger writes back. That worked when a blacksmith needed one apprentice from one village. It does not survive a global labor pool, and it will not survive a colony on Mars.

Hiring is a storytelling problem. After a lot of experimentation, this is where Planetary Talent landed. How well can we understand a person's story, how well can we understand a company's and a founder's, and where do those two things genuinely align. Most people are bad at telling their own story. Most companies are worse. Jacob came out of branding, so that gap is the one he had spent a career closing.

Digital Replicas, and the case against compression. Planetary Talent builds data models of the talent, the company, and the founders. Those models, called Digital Replicas™, interface with each other to assess fit at scale. The resume asks you to cut and cut and cut until a life fits on a page. Digital Replicas do the opposite. The more we know about what you have built and what you are proud of, the better the match gets.

Why this is not a dating app. It is the closest available analogy, and Jacob uses it, with one sharp caveat. A dating app is incentivized to find you almost the right person, because the right person costs them a customer. Planetary Talent only wins when the match is correct, because a company that grows comes back for the next hire.

The ideal candidate who does not exist. When a role opens, the system generates the perfect person for it. Internally the team calls them the synthetic candidate. The founder gets to critique that profile before anyone real is contacted. Then the profile becomes a marketing persona, and the persona becomes digital ads. A halo of related ads runs alongside it, which is how a founder who asked for a product designer finds out the market says they want a senior product specialist, and that their compensation band is a little light.

A deliberate refusal to poach. Traditional matchmaking runs on a bench, a list, and cold calls to people who are already happy. Planetary Talent will not do it. If someone is on a mission they believe in, the civilizational math says leave them there. Every human who enters the pipeline arrived because they wanted to.

The questions a language model cannot fake. Hard requirements get validated early, compensation and location and the rest. Then come the open questions. What is the project you are proudest of. Which team did you most enjoy being part of. ChatGPT has no idea. Only you do. That is where the useful signal turns out to live.

No robots in the first interview. Some companies are building AI screeners that make you talk to a machine before a person. Jacob is blunt about it: that is dehumanizing. Plenty gets validated before a call happens, but when a call happens, there is a human on the other end.

The missing middle. Fiverr and Upwork handle gig work, and handle it reasonably well. Executive search handles the C-suite. Between them sits every full-time individual contributor a growing company actually needs, and the only options have been LinkedIn, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter. That gap is the whole business.

How to hold an all-hands with someone on the moon. Planetary Talent has a hundred year business plan, and the team debates problems that sound absurd until you scale them down. The moon runs a twenty-three hour day and two weeks of unbroken light. There is no good hour to gather everyone. Which is the identical problem the company already has, right now, with a co-founder in Pune, eleven and a half hours off, and teammates on two American time zones. The current experiment involves internal channels, uploaded all-hands, and reaction videos. Solve it for Pune and you have solved it for the moon.

"You should be able to put out a stream of consciousness right into the universe and have the perfect person come back to you, click a button, and they're on your team tomorrow."

"If it's not about making Earth's best talent accessible to growing companies, then throw it overboard."

The Advice at the End

Samuel closes by asking what a founder should do if they do not have a story yet. The answer is not a story. It is a mission, stated plainly enough that every person on the team has it memorized, and firm enough that anything failing to serve it gets thrown overboard. Products change. Services change. The mission is the thing you steer by.

Ours has not moved since we started. We are making Earth's most talented workforce accessible to growing companies.

Listen to the full episode, "Why the Resume Is Broken and What Comes Next," on the Killer Growth podcast. Thanks for having us, Samuel.

Onward and upward.